Wide-moat companies derive their durability from owned assets — patents, brands, networks, and proprietary IP — exactly the assets that compound when ownership beats labor. This basket concentrates capital in firms with pricing power that captures economic surplus from a devalued workforce.

These firms own libraries of songs, films, shows, franchises, and games — perpetual royalty machines that monetize the same IP indefinitely with near-zero marginal labor cost. As distribution scales globally and AI lowers production cost, the value accrues entirely to the catalog owner, not the creators or workers.

Pure royalty structures are the cleanest expression of 'own the asset, skip the labor' — they collect cash flows from IP they purchased without doing the creative work. Pharma royalties and music catalogs throw off recurring income tied to ownership of proven hits.

A pair trade: go long the owners of AI capability and compute (the asset) while shorting human-labor brokers whose entire business is selling skills and headcount. As capital substitutes for labor, the value migrates from the staffing intermediaries to the platform and infrastructure owners.