What does it take for a lower-ranked university to compete with a top-ranked one?
Money can indeed buy a lot of things that will move you up in rankings, though probably not all. It's true that you will be able to attract good faculty with money -- spent on salaries, research infrastructure, beautiful offices and spacious labs well equipped with machinery, several postdocs attached to each professor position, and maybe money to support (grad) students and travel. For this, you will actually need a lot of money -- take a look at the budgets of the really good universities in the US and UK, and you will realize that you will need an operating budget in the $1+B region per year. So $10B will be spent quite quickly.

But that by itself will not be enough. Faculty will generally only go to places where there are also good students, and the best students go where they can historically expect to get an excellent education. To find out where these places are, they look at, say, the top 20 or 30 universities in the world -- so you're caught in a catch-22 if you want to move up. In other words, you have to have a long-term strategy to move up: things can't be achieved within a few years, but it will take 10, 20, 30 years of big spending if you really want to get high in that list.

There are some examples of relatively new universities who have really tried this, and you can look at the press coverage to see what they have achieved and what they haven't:


The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia
The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan
National University of Singapore


There are other examples in China and in the gulf countries of universities that have (tried to) significantly rise in rankings in recent decades.