Tom steyer spent half a billion to not even make it onto the final ca ballot

I think you'd find more examples of people spending much much less money to influence elections, or buy certain positions than you will people spending money to make the public vote for them. The money influences policies, regulations, wars, etc.

The problem isn’t necessarily that some one can buy a seat for themselves (though some people out there could spend 1000x as much as half a billion and still have 500 billion to spend), it's that for less than half a billion, someone can buy 20 house or senate seats for more conventional candidates that are willing to vote the way the financier wants.

Buying senate seats is for chumps. For $300 million, Musk got his own executive branch agency, a pseudo cabinet level position, and carte blanche to take a machete to all the programs he personally disliked including investigations into himself and his companies.