But it's not impossible to be powerful without turning your immediate work into money. You might be able to help others make/turn their work into money, which makes me go off on a tangent in my head about an algorithm that could calculate how much power one truly had based on n degrees of separation out from their work.
> You might be able to help others make/turn their work into money
Of course it's possible but it introduces a level of indirectness. Once you have indirectness, it becomes harder to measure your impact. Fields where one's impact is hard to measure tend to attract BS artists who use the ambiguity to their advantage, to claim that they are worth more than they really are.
The algorithm you are thinking of will fail unless it has some way to empirically measure impact, in which case the algorithm would be trivial.
