The spherical means Radon transform f(x, r) is defined by the integral of a function f in ℝn over the sphere S(x, r) of radius r centered at a x, normalized by the area of the sphere. The problem of reconstructing f from the data f(x, r) where x belongs to a hypersurface Γ⊆ℝn and r ∈ (0, ∞) has important applications in modern imaging modalities, such as photo- and thermoacoustic tomography. When Γ coincides with the boundary ∂Ω of a bounded (convex) domain Ω⊆ℝn, a function supported within Ω can be uniquely recovered from its spherical means known on Γ. We are interested in explicit inversion formulas for such a reconstruction. If Γ=∂Ω, such formulas are only known for the case when Γ is an ellipsoid (or one of its partial cases). This gives rise to the natural question: can explicit inversion formulas be found for other closed hypersurfaces Γ? In this article we prove, for the so-called "universal backprojection inversion formulas", that their extension to non-ellipsoidal domains Ω is impossible, and therefore ellipsoids constitute the largest class of closed convex hypersurfaces for which such formulas hold.