You're kind of right. I misread the decimal as a comma in $248,785,615.00. Pharma / Health is the next highest spending industry at around $144,778,982, about $100 million less than finance. Finance is the top lobby. Tech lobbying is at $68,403,203 which isn't even half of what finance officially spends on lobbying.
The OpenSecrets lobbying data also doesn't include lobbying money that isn't officially lobbying money. A lot of politicians, at least in the US - including state level legislators, have non-profit foundations with sketchy ledgers. With many of these foundations, little of the money dontated actually goes towards their publicly stated causes. Most of it is spent on miscellaneous expenses such as trips and dinners or on political ads.
If you include the finance industry's donations to sketcy non-profits that are closely tied to politicians, then I'm guessing it would dwarf what we're seeing compared to just official lobbying money
Tech would 'optimize' not just by spending more, but also in offering benefits that finance can't offer such as better data for say elections as an example
- [Lobbying Spending Database | OpenSecrets](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2017&inde...)
And note that "Education" isn't spending that much less!
> imo this is one of the things the tech industry hasn't fully optimized yet
How would the tech industry "optimize" lobbying? Or even just lobbying by finance?