There's a few things that I could have patented in the '80s and 90's, but didn't, becase they were in my engineering supervisors word's: "F______g obvious." Later I went back and found out that someone elsewhere did receive a patent on some of these ideas. Don't know if they received money for any licenses, but somewhere in a corporate vault/storage are my engineering logbooks in case of a legal dispute.
Mark Cuban is interesting person. Back in the day (Web 1.0 and Audionet), I had lunch with him and a few others at the Infomart. I questioned his business, since at the time a single radio station had more listeners than what was capable with the bandwidth of the Internet then. He said, "X, we don't sell the steak, we sell the sizzle."