His ability to use his wealth to influence the government and the populous would be significantly reduced. There's a big difference between "rich" and "rich enough circumvent democracy."
Don’t you think a far bigger threat to democracy is that government allows this influence? And voters seem to be perfectly OK with both 250M campaign contributions and widespread lobbying?
Whataboutism. Which is funny because it's literally the same problem.
It's somewhat intractable at this point unless or until we can figure out how to structure society in a way that can actually prevent it. Not sure we have the organizational knowledge at this point.
The government used to have better guards in place, but then what happened? They got weakened because of the monied interests already existed were successful at largely capturing the government. Guess what else happened during much the same time period; The government largely stopped breaking up monopolies, and many unions were busted or otherwise weakened or eliminated.
Those are coalitions of politicians, which to an increasing extent are part of the "powerful" group that needs to be overridden. By coalitions I mean coalitions of the actual citizenry.