My bank account says otherwise, but it depends.
If you think about the amount of money given up as a startup employee you will definitely get some winnings.
For example, say as a startup employee you are earning/being compensated 80,000 a year in equity. If you bought $80,000 of lottery ticket’s each year how much would you win. Depends on the lottery but most lottery’s have a rough payout of approximately 50-70%. Let’s say it’s 50%. So you would expect to receive back $40,000 per year.
Do half of all startups equity turn into cash, I think not. So probably more likely to make money from the lottery.
But most startup people don’t work at most startups.
For the most part, outcomes largely track from strategy and execution.
The purpose is to trade EV for a small probability of high payout. It's less extreme than the big ticket lotteries but more extreme than a scratcher. If that's not for you, don't do it
Also your last point is either obviously not true (if you're talking about big lottery winnings) or trivially true (if you're talking about $1000 scratcher prizes). More people made life changing money from a single company (Facebook) than all California lottery winners combined across all time
You are making an empirical claim that can be made rigorous, it's just off by several orders of magnitude
Surely the calc is, the number of money gambled in startup equity versus the amount of money gambled in the lottery.
Do startups payout at .5 or above, I think not.
Also…the lottery and startups work very differently.