Where’s John Carpenter Now, 25 Years After Becoming the First ‘Millionaire’ Millionaire?

As millions of viewers and host Regis Philbin looked on, John Carpenter rocketed to the top question of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire across two nights of gameplay. And on November 19, 1999, he became the ABC game show’s first million-dollar winner. On that last question, he finally used a lifeline — not for a hint but for a gloat.

“Uh, hi, Dad. I don’t really need your help,” Carpenter said after ringing up his father. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to win the million dollars.”

And that’s exactly what he did, correctly identifying Richard Nixon as the U.S. president who appeared on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

The win and — the lifeline flex — made the then-31-year-old from Hamden, Connecticut, a national hero. That’s no small feat for a guy who works for the Internal Revenue Service.

“It was a spur of the moment thing. I’m a little bit of a smartass,” Carpenter told The Washington Post in a 2020 interview, looking back on his confidence during that $1 million question. “I look back on it and — well, thank God I was right.”

The experience was “very surreal,” Carpenter said, and it led to many more TV appearances and celebrity encounters. Ahead of Carpenter’s interview with David Letterman on The Late Show, for instance, Tony Bennett dropped by his dressing room. “[He] told me Friday night was the best thing he’d ever seen on TV,” Carpenter told People afterward. “I was just floored. What a gentleman.”

In an Saturday Night Live cold open the night after Carpenter’s win, Darrell Hammond’s Donald Trump announced his run for U.S. president and picked Carpenter as his running mate. That sketch razzed Carpenter for coming off “kinda arrogant” on the game show, but the Millionaire star didn’t mind. “It’s SNL,” he told Trivia Hall of Fame in 2007. “I’d have dropped my pants to have been on that show.”

Carpenter also played himself on the HBO prison drama Oz, appearing as a contestant on Up Your Ante, a favorite game show among the characters.

In the end, Carpenter ended up pocketing about $600,000 of the prize money after taxes — and he kept his IRS job. “It’s a hell of a lot of money, but I live in New England,” he said. “If I lived somewhere else, maybe it would be different.”

 

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He did buy a new car with his winnings, as he said in a behind-the-scenes Millionaire clip this year. “But I needed one anyway,” he said. “I was just driving around in an old Honda del Sol with some body damage at the time.”

Carpenter played Millionaire once more during Season 1’s “Championship Week” and won another $125,000 for himself and $125,000 for charity.

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At the time of his 2020 Post interview, Carpenter was living a normal life in Connecticut, which included trivia nights at a local brewery where only some players knew of his TV fame.

He said in the Millionaire BTS clip that the $1 million jackpot made his life more comfortable. “It’s not like I could live on it forever — I still kept my job — but it was good to have,” he said.

These days, Carpenter is still working for the IRS, as he revealed when he returned to the Millionaire stage as an audience member this July during the game show’s 25th anniversary season.

“So when you won that million dollars, almost immediately, you had to give $400,000 of it to the people you work for?” host Jimmy Kimmel asked him.

“Plus the state of Connecticut,” Carpenter quipped.