Ben Affleck and Jamie Ding turned Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? into a $1 million charity run on the July 29 episode, answering all 15 multiple-choice questions and sending the prize to the Eastern Congo Initiative. The result gives Affleck’s group a seven-figure payout after a finish that still came down to the last stretch of the game.
15 questions, no misses
Affleck said the Eastern Congo Initiative has funded more than 100 Congolese organizations over the past 17 years, so the win lands as a direct cash boost for a group built to move money through local leaders rather than a single large campaign. That structure makes the payout less about a symbolic check and more about a pool of support that can be distributed across ongoing work.
Jamie Ding came into the episode with some real game-show pedigree of his own: he won 31 consecutive games and $882,605 on Jeopardy! from March to April. On Millionaire, the pairing fit the format well enough to keep moving when the money climbed, and the show got a rare full-game charity win out of it.
Jimmy Kimmel's lifelines
The pair entered the July 29 episode with two questions left and three lifelines still intact: 50/50, phone a friend, and asking Jimmy Kimmel. The $500,000 question asked what achievement happened just two months after a New York Times article said it would not happen for 1 million to 10 million years, and the answer was the first airplane flight.
Ben Affleck later said, “For the past 17 years, Eastern Congo Initiative has funded more than 100 Congolese organizations helping local leaders build lasting solutions” and added, “It has been a privilege to watch them create a more peaceful, prosperous, and hopeful future for eastern Congo.” He also said, “And it was a great honor to ride Jamie's coattails all the way.”
Jamie Ding's last stretch
Ding said, “We were kind of an arranged marriage” and, “It's good to have different areas of expertise.” He also said, “I feel like I was quite nervous toward the end because it's a lot of money,” and that Affleck was “maybe a little more decisive toward the end.”
The final question involved turkeys that had not received presidential pardons, which made the last step more than a trivia prompt and less than a coin flip. Jimmy Kimmel said, “There are no pardons for us,” after the clue narrowed the field, while Affleck asked, “How many nighttime talk show hosts are there that have been doing this?”
That win leaves the money with the Eastern Congo Initiative and adds another clean result to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? after Matt Damon’s $1 million jackpot with Ken Jennings in a previous season. The sharper question now is how the organization parcels out the $1 million across the local-leader model Affleck described, because that is where the prize turns from television money into actual operating support.
[For more on another celebrity pair on the show, see Larry David and Cazzie David land on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Season 5.]
