Money is not the same thing as power, although power usually makes money abundant. Billionaires have in many ways much less power than even a relatively minor g

Money is not the same thing as power, although power usually makes money abundant. Billionaires have in many ways much less power than even a relatively minor government official or regulator. Zuckerberg learned this the hard way when he spaffed $100 million on New York schools and ended up with zero measurable difference in outcomes. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-donation-155608055.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-... $100 million down the drain, largely because - guess what - the politics of Newark were totally unaffected by all this money. Zuck wanted a new teachers contract that linked pay to performance to be a part of the reform, and $50m of the $100m was devoted to achieving this outcome. It was meant to be used for teacher bonuses and so on. But only the state legislature could make real change there, and they didn't. Instead the contract was renegotiated with seniority protections intact because the union refused to budge on it, and the local government rolled over. The district also spent huge sums of money on "consultants" making $1000/day - $20m of it went down that rabbit hole. In the end Zuck discovered that you can't solve political problems with money, no matter how much you throw around. Trump beat Clinton despite spending 50% as much, even though Obama had been warning after Citizens United that it represented a "serious harm to democracy". People tend to over-estimate the impact money can have on society.