A significant difference with LPP here, which some commenters don’t seem to have taken on board, is that Eric’s overriding purpose is to get cheap fusion power deployed widely ASAP. By anyone. The point of holding tight control of the FF patents in this case is purely protective — to make sure they can’t be acquired and suppressed. I stand to be corrected, but if another lab were to “steal” his ideas and come up with a functioning generator first and begin promoting and selling it, I doubt very much that Eric/LPP would sue to block them.
So the risk of a bigger better funded corporation stealing a march, so to speak, would be limited to whether it attempted to gain and exploit a monopoly position.
The best and most likely scenario remains, IMO, that LPP comes up with a working prototype and licenses the design to everyone who has the capacity to duplicate/manufacture it, with approximate/reasonable restrictions on over-pricing. That blows the game wide open.
