This is interesting to me. It makes me wonder "are there cases where someone made the market more efficient and was not made very wealthy?" I think you're right that there is a massive incentive for the market to be more efficient, but I suspect there are cases where people were able to develop alpha without being able to capitalize on it, because the market denied or neglected the insight.

Were there free markets in the 17th century, would they have been able to incorporate Galileo's insight? Or would they have joined the church in denunciation? Part of me thinks that if they did eventually come around to the solar system, it wouldn't be all that quick.

Did Jonas Salk make the market more efficient?

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."[1]

In other words, you can also lose money, even if you're right.

1. Pseudo-Keynes: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

Perhaps, but the Google anti-trust suit would seem a timely contradiction too. Monopolies are incentivised to keep the market inefficient (or roughly as efficient as it is) because change jeopardises their dominant position.

A monopoly is not a market. One person is not a group.

A monopoloy dominates a market but you are welcome to ignore that.

interesting. Let me see if I can parrot that back in a different way. If one investor 'messes up' (an inefficiency). Another one may step in and make it 'closer to efficient' as there is some value to be made. That would assume an unlimited number of investors maybe? inefficiency is therefore removed from the system. On a static scale which most people forget the market is most certainly not one, it would be in an inefficient state. But as time iterates on it would tend towards it as inefficient actors remove themselves.