I'm an optimist and forward looking person at heart. But the last couple of years have made me cynical enough that I researched the 'most free' country in the world as an expatriate destination[0].
We are witnessing super-wealthy individuals, I think the word is oligarch, use their out-sized wealth to advance causes outside of the domain that made them wealthy. Obvious examples include Bill Gates advancing world health, Mark Zuckerberg funding Freedom of Expression initiatives, and Soros' Open Society Foundations.
These initiatives can be impactful simply based on the resources supporting them. For example, LinkedIn reports 1,100 people currently working for Open Society Foundations. That number would require an annual budget in the realm of $200,000,000. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shows 2,500 people working. Both Soros and Gates could easily fund those workforces out of their passive income.
Certainly, we've had relatively super-wealthy persons in the past. What's new is the reach that these current oligarchs can leverage. Their wealth is drawn from a global revenue, their workforces can easily travel globally, and they can promote their message globally using the Internet and Web, which have supplanted both the print and radio media that earlier oligarchs were confined to.
Whether or not you see this as a threat, my take is that I did not vote for Gates as world health oligarch or Soros as societal transformation oligarch, but they have taken those mantles on themselves. Whether for better or worse, I didn't have a say, but they can impose their initiatives on me. That bothers me.
[0] https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new