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I can understand that there are a limited number of people who can understand and apply the math necessary, but not that it could remain proprietary for 30 years.

Usually if a company has secret sauce, someone will leave and spin off on their own. Even Google can't retain everyone. So unless I'm missing something, any explanation has to account for why this hasn't occurred here.

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Very tight NDAs (that they actually litigate) coupled with enforceable non-competes ("garden leave" where they pay your salary for, say, a year as part of the deal before you can leave for a competitor) is part of it.

Really high comp is another.

Perhaps a bigger deal is the fact that they actively return money over the roughly $10BN fund value, implying that the strategy doesn't work past that point. A competitor would then be stuck in a zero-sum game battling for a slice of a fixed pie rather than being able to grow the market.

They pay waaaaaaay more to keep their people. And there are powerful incentives at work - competition would seriously diminish their rewards.

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