The sockets would need some work for decent power transfer - it needs to do at least the 150 watts that USB-C can do, and preferably 150 kwatts for charging a car.

For 150 watts while maintaining backwards compatibility, all that's needed is larger contact area (curved spring clips) to support 3 amps and the use of 48 volts after negotiation.

For 150 kilowatts we'd be talking some cutting edge stuff, but not beyond the realms of possibility. Specifically, you'd probably need to use voltages up to 20,000 volts, 10 amps, which is going to mean you need to have mating and sealing rubber isolators on both plug and socket at least 3mm thick between poles. At these voltages, you cannot have air between the pins, so it must be a hermetic seal. You'd also need to measure leakage current and keep the cable capacitance low enough that when someone cuts through the cable with scissors the voltage can be dropped in microseconds to prevent zapping them.

But the business person tells me that even if I could do it and make it safe enough to use, there is zero chance any big company would license the tech.

The only problem I see with this is that fiber optic cables are physically less robust (you can't bend them as much).

Pretty much, if you bend it too much, your connection will slow down temporarily till you straighten it again. That seems like a fine tradeoff.

Industrial fiber systems usually used fixed speed, so too much bending leads to a total failure of the connection - hence the strict bend limits on fibers.