Gil & Jacki Cisneros Won $266 Million: Beating the ‘Lottery Curse’

SOME PEOPLE GET RUINED BY THE LUCK OF INSTANT ULTRA-WEALTH. BUT 15 YEARS AFTER THIS CALIFORNIA COUPLE WON BIG, THEY SHARE HOW THEY’VE STAYED GROUNDED AND FOCUSED ON HELPING STUDENTS IN NEED

- JANELLE GRIFFITH,CHERISS MAY

The Next Generation Gil (with Jacki, front, and students from their institute in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 20) encourages young people to remember "it's hard trying to figure it out on your own."

One night in the spring of 2010, as California couple Jacki and Gil Cisneros headed to a steak dinner (at Outback, a splurge), they played a game of “what if.” What if they … won the lottery? Gil, then between jobs as a manufacturing manager, indulged his wife, who was working the graveyard shift for a local TV station as an assignment editor on contract. He said his first priority as a millionaire would be to help kids find a path to college so they wouldn’t have to struggle the way he had as a boy from modest means. Two weeks later Jacki was at work when she heard someone had just won the Mega Millions jackpot after buying a lottery ticket at the same Hawaiian barbecue restaurant where Gil had picked up dinner the night before. She woke him with a phone call, and together they matched the numbers to his ticket—worth $266 million. “I just started crying,” recalls Jacki, 55. “It was the biggest relief.” Telling that story now, she says she becomes emotional “when I look back, and I see the things that we were able to do because of it and people that we’ve been able to touch.”