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Are lottery tickets ever a wise investment provided the jackpot is large enough?
If you just buy a few lotto tickets normally, then no, it's not going to be a good investment, as @Jasper has shown. However, there are certain scenarios where you can get a positive expected value from a lottery. In 2012, it was revealed that some MIT students found a scheme to game the Massachusetts state lottery.  The game, called Cash WinFall, had a quirk in the rules: the jackpot prize was capped at $2 million.  Any money in the jackpot beyond $2 million would increase the payout of the consolation prizes.  Thus, the game would sometimes have a positive expected value.  The return on investment was 15% to 20% — enough for the participants to quit their jobs. This specific loophole is no longer available: a cap was placed on the number of tickets sold per store, then the game was discontinued altogether. Another possible strategy is to buy enough tickets to nearly assure a win, as one investment group did in 1992.  Given a large enough jackpot, this strategy can yield a positive expected value, but not a guaranteed profit. Caveats include: Or, you might be a genius and exploit a flaw in the lottery's pseudorandom number generator, as one statistician did in an Ontario scratch-off lottery in 2011.