Jonathan Strange

Elon Musk often says: "Patents are for the weak." Why does he say that? In 2014, Tesla opened up all its patents. Anyone could use them. Everyone thought it was a PR stunt. It was actually a declaration of war. Elon's point was that patents mostly serve to slow down progress, protect the positions of giant corporations, and make lawyers rich. Not to innovate. His logic is simple: if your competitive advantage lives inside a legal document, you're already dead. The only real moat is your speed of innovation. If you move faster than everyone else, you don't need patents. If you need patents to survive, it means you've stopped moving fast enough. The strong build. The weak file. And AI is about to make that sentence true for the entire economy. Take biotech. For 50 years, starting a biotech company meant a PhD, ten years in a lab, access to closely guarded knowledge, millions before your first proof of concept, and a network in the right academic and regulatory circles. Knowledge was scarce, access was scarce, and that scarcity was worth billions. That scarcity is dying. I genuinely believe we're entering a world where anyone will be able to start a biotech company. A 19-year-old with AI agents will be able to explore molecular spaces that entire labs used to spend years mapping. Trade secrets, credential rents, access rents, positional rents: all of it is about to blow up. And look at what's already happening. Some of the first calls to "urgently regulate AI agents" are coming from established biotech players. Coincidence? When your business model depends on scarce knowledge and knowledge becomes free, you're left with only two weapons: the patent and the regulator. The two weapons of the weak. Here's what's coming. A wave of panic. Dozens of labs and incumbents retreating behind their patents, filing lawsuits, and above all pouring money into regulatory capture. They won't try to build better. They'll try to make it illegal for anyone else to build. Because the truth is, a lot of people in business were never strong. They were protected. They never won on product, on innovation, on speed of execution. They won because the market was locked. Because attacking their industry required hundreds of millions of dollars, years of approvals, and armies of lawyers. The wall was never their talent. The wall was regulation. And when the wall comes down, we find out who actually knew how to build. This isn't just biotech. Banking. Insurance. Law. Healthcare. Energy. Hardware. Education. Defense. Almost every industry where incumbents were sleeping behind barriers to entry is about to get hit by thousands of founders able to attack their business from every angle at once. With teams of 5 people and an army of agents. Everyone gets to play now. My conviction, and I'll say it plainly: a huge chunk of the S&P 500 could be completely flushed in the next 5 years. Not because those companies will make mistakes. Because their competitive advantage was never real. It was built on how hard it was to get in, and that difficulty is disappearing. The weak will cry danger. They'll talk about safety, risk, disaster. Sometimes they'll be right on a specific point. But most of the time, what they're protecting isn't the public. It's their rent. What's coming isn't a collapse. It's a renaissance. The biggest explosion of value creation in history, driven by people who were always told they weren't allowed to play. Patents are for the weak. And the weak are about to have a very bad decade.