In a meritocracy, a person should become powerful/rich according to their merit—education, skill, diligence, etc. However, what then happens is elites start religiously investing all they can (and they can invest a lot) into ensuring their own offspring has even more of that merit than others.

As an exaggerated example, you can’t buy your kid a Pfeiffer turbopump to experiment with if you are choosing between bread and soap when you’re going to the store.

What we get as a result is the same ever-growing gap between the already-rich and the rest. Meritocracy turns into plutocracy as merit becomes more or less a proxy for wealth.

Breaking that trend would involve actions that go beyond meritocracy, and arguably are un-meritocratic: instead of just rewarding by merit, it’s about helping more people have that merit regardless of their or their parents’ wealth.