No, the amount of Steem you have, is not synonymous with becoming a top witness.
Witness are voted into the top 20 by accounts on the Steem blockchain. Members with accounts on the blockchain vote in accordance to what the witness has to offer to the community, and monetary worth is at the bottom of that checklist, if even present at all.
It would take so much Steem to game that system, that everyone would know what you're doing, and the other 19 tops (and entire community) would have no respect for you, whatsoever.
Musing doesn't let me answer my own question, but I was able to find the answer after some scouring, and it turns out that you actually can buy your way into becoming a top wintess. It would just cost about 26 MILLION STEEM as of now, so about $23,000,000 if prices remained the exact same(which they won't because of supply and demand). But all you would have to do is buy that much STEEM, and then start a witness node and finally vote yourself for witness. You might not become liked by the community and they may vote others to bring you down in ranks, but it does look like it is possible.
So the value of your vote affects the weight of the vote for witness? Wow I didn't know this, but I guess it makes sense. I should have looked into this a bit more before assuming I knew the answer. My apologies for answering incorrectly. This certainly is interesting to know.
Yeah, I didn't know that there was already info precompiled about how much mVests that each witness had received, but found out shortly after posting the question. You can find that information here : https://steemian.info/witnesses. The witness at rank 20(currently @utopian-io) has about 54 mVests voting for them. So if I could buy up 54 mVests worth of STEEM and power it up, I could theoretically become a top 20 witness. Only problem with that is that it'll get very very expensive. I could probably buy one million or so STEEM at the current price, but then the price will go up and it will end up costing me a lot more.
Thank you for the information! This is a gem of a database!
If you have the ability to buy a million Steem, I'm sure there are some people on the blockchain that would be very interested in talking with you. There are many projects going on right now that are looking for delegations, and partnership opportunities.
I'm by no means suggesting you shouldn't run a node. If that is something you have a passion, and an aptitude for, go for it, but I wouldn't limit yourself. Just the curation alone for an account with a million SP, is pretty juicy.