I'm a bit loathe to give this response as I come here to get away from politics, but look at how Koch Industries and the like subverted the tea party movement,

I'm a bit loathe to give this response as I come here to get away from politics, but look at how Koch Industries and the like subverted the tea party movement, and the effect that that's had on congress. That's the kind of power money buys: the power to take a small, libertarian grass-roots organization and turn it into a nation-wide astroturfed phenomenon, getting dozens of congressmen elected in the process and having a huge impact on government policy. $60m doesn't buy you that kind of power, but $10b does. This is what the parent was saying, and what Gates doesn't think about because he clearly never tried to use his money to exert that kind of power (the courts might have been nicer to him if he had). The tech industry in general seems reluctant to use its vast wealth to exert that kind of power. If they had spent half the money they did in the patent wars on lobbyists, we likely wouldn't have the e-parasite act and its similarly harmful brethren. That's just not how we think, however, and so much smaller industries end up exerting a huge amount of power.