In nature, might makes right. Most societies around the world, as they advance, replace this with a less violent way to trade resources and services. If you define power as the capacity to do something (or obtain something), then money has been the solution that most societies have figured.
I specify non corrupted to exclude situations such as mafias and gangs using force instead of money to make things happen.
so, it's interesting. you can see it both ways. Money distills a certain kind of power; one of the sorts of power individuals can have within a lawful system; but... there are other kinds of power that money simply doesn't convey, at least not in a system with functional rule of law.
in societies with rule of law, money provides power in a way that is... limited. No amount of money (assuming rule of law, reasonable laws, uncorrupted law enforcement, etc..) lets you have a person killed, or even roughed up without lawful reason.
In that sense, even very small time gangsters, people who make way less money than a silicon valley engineer, have more power than a law-abiding billionaire, just 'cause they can credibly threaten to have you killed.
I mean sure, the rule of law should prevent the murder in both cases, but on a practical level, it's really a lot harder to prevent crimes in the first place than to punish them after they occur; The low-level gangster's seeming willingness to do things that could potentially cause them to spend a lot of time in jail is a kind of power in and of itself, one that is unrelated (some would say negatively correlated) with wealth.
Another interesting side to this is that you could also argue that outside of functional rule of law, money is... worth a lot less, just 'cause you have to put in a lot more effort to protect that money, if the government won't do it. Without the rule of law, if you have money but don't have the sort of power that flows from the barrel of a gun, someone will simply take the money from you using that sort of power. Sure, you can hire bodyguards, but absent rule of law, what's to stop them from just stealing your money? you need some of that other kind of power to convince your bodyguards to work for a wage rather than just stealing your money.
The whole point of the rule of law is to extend power as far as practicable, and one key way of doing this is removing the temptation for extortion. The "power to have someone killed" is inherently incompatible with the "power not to end up being killed". Generally, we care a whole lot more about the latter than the former! Even gangsters only exert that kind of power because they are operating in a venue without a stable rule of law, where gangs flourish, and this is a rational way to protect themselves.
I specify non corrupted to exclude situations such as mafias and gangs using force instead of money to make things happen.