Well, he did patent it first. You could also frame it as the "small inventor who goes against the big coroporation".

That said I had to sigh little bit as I read the author. James Altucher is more a guy who tries to write literature with every article and a common theme in all is his nerdyness (reading books all day, playing Go/Chess all day, never winning the girl, losing the girl) and his failure in the dotcom economy to getting obscenely rich (respectively losing all in the stock crash after.) He sometimes linked on the Freakonomics blog.