>I heard someone threw half a billion dollars at an election and couldn't change people's minds.

hard to change the minds of a bunch of pissed off folks when your political campaign funding is pushing AI ads about transfolk and not grocery prices or datacenter rollouts.

You're arguing that the governing structure democracy cannot accomplish things with money. That's true, but for completely different reasons. The analogy doesn't really work here because Microsoft is run by a CEO and is functionally a monarchy without any need to persuade anyone beyond their paycheck.

Someone else threw the same amount of money in the other direction. Your comparison would make sense if there were a second trillion-dollar company spending their entire budget on trying to make Outlook go down, which is not the case. But we do all know that your goal wasn't actually to make an apt analogy, and just to shove your political whining into an unrelated discussion.