in societies with rule of law, money provides power in a way that is... limited. No amount of money (assuming rule of law, reasonable laws, uncorrupted law enforcement, etc..) lets you have a person killed, or even roughed up without lawful reason.
In that sense, even very small time gangsters, people who make way less money than a silicon valley engineer, have more power than a law-abiding billionaire, just 'cause they can credibly threaten to have you killed.
I mean sure, the rule of law should prevent the murder in both cases, but on a practical level, it's really a lot harder to prevent crimes in the first place than to punish them after they occur; The low-level gangster's seeming willingness to do things that could potentially cause them to spend a lot of time in jail is a kind of power in and of itself, one that is unrelated (some would say negatively correlated) with wealth.
Another interesting side to this is that you could also argue that outside of functional rule of law, money is... worth a lot less, just 'cause you have to put in a lot more effort to protect that money, if the government won't do it. Without the rule of law, if you have money but don't have the sort of power that flows from the barrel of a gun, someone will simply take the money from you using that sort of power. Sure, you can hire bodyguards, but absent rule of law, what's to stop them from just stealing your money? you need some of that other kind of power to convince your bodyguards to work for a wage rather than just stealing your money.