So even though someone here might enjoy my posts about sports, pop culture or unicorns and vote for it, it won't bear the same influence as these 'whales' who start themselves out with massive steem aka their investments. But hypothetically, If I wanted to hijack all this I could pay cash for steem and throw approval around at dumb ideas but that would be cash out of my pocket and into theirs which is kind of like paying damages anyways. Am I getting warmer?

That's exactly right. If you were to buy-in in a big way then you could make all sorts of dumb votes (say upvoting spam) and the money to pay for those posts would come out of your (and other investors') pockets by way of dilution. Or, at the same cost to you, you could choose to vote for good posts that direct your money toward adding to the value of the platform. Most significant stakeholders will likely do the latter—that's the theory anyway.