It is not all about money, it just looks like those people with fortunate life or those rich people became good at laws just because of knowledge and not of money. If you have good knowledge then there would be no problem in terms of that thing because knowledge is always the asset for every aspect of our lives.
I agree with you that knowledge is very important, but we need to be objective here. There are a lot of smart people who are not rich. Most university professors have a lot of knowledge and are smart but are definitely not rich. The salary for the professors is very small for what they could be earning in industry jobs. Also there is a lot of rich families who are rich because their grand parents and so on. So there will also be some dumb people who are fairly rich.
There is a correlation between smart but also unethical but also smart and not wanting, there are different types of smart. So, you need to be "smart to be rich" but you do not need to be "rich to be smart" which means almost all rich people are some sort of smart, not academics smart maybe but still some type of smart, also there are some people who are smart but unethical like Jeff Bezos who doesn't pay a single cent in federal taxes and his workers are paid so little and works so hard that they do not even have a proper bathroom breaks and apply for food stamps that is paid by federal government, so basically amazon costs money to tax payers, just so Jeff Bezos gets richer.
But there are people who found some cancer treatment and got rich, maybe not Jeff Bezos rich but still rich, those deserved it and they are ethical as well and also smart. Basically rich people are always some type of smart, even if not academic type of smart it would still be smart.