Also, re: money, money is not power.
If I may quote a comic bookstick figure lich, POWER ... is power.
Our society is somewhat egalitarian in that you can buy power with money, and anyone can potentially gain enough money to be able to buy quite a bit of power, but there are some very strict yet undefinable limits on how much power your money can buy. Even infinite money can't buy all the power.
Power is power.
What pisses off Trump is that he's believed all this time that money WAS power, and he's now finding out those limits. That's why he walks out of yet another court loss muttering "This isn't America!" Because he thought, in America, that money was power.
But money isn't power. Not even here. POWER is power.
Other countries have their own mechanisms. China's power, for 5 millennia, has been tied up in the bureaucracy; when Kublai Khan took over after his father "conquered," it was only by remaining subservient to the bureaucracy that he could reign. Repeat for every new conqueror, for every new revolutionary. Military might can get you most of the power, but not all.
And for all that time, if a Chinese person passed the civil service exam, no matter who you were, you became part of that bureaucracy, and from there you wielded power. Education could get you power, but not all the power.
Power is power. You can buy power with money, you can conquer power with armed forces, you can gain rank with education. But these are just effective but limited tools that hide the reality.