If Harvard admission criteria leave out the best applicants to other colleges, and they go on to create powerful companies like Google in large number, will Harvard’s prestige decrease despite continued support from the elites?

Doing very well in tech entrepreneurship needs intelligence more than great personality and political connections (they should be above a level but you don’t need a very high level of them).

Politics is still the most direct route to power but billionaires are also powerful and have longer influence. If next generation moguls are educated elsewhere, the colleges with more merit based criteria can emerge as more elite. By merit, the criteria may include other objectively useful metrics in addition to academics.