Author:  M. Hartwell Affiliation:  Independent Researcher Abstract A common business claim—often repeated in classrooms, boardrooms, and social media—is that WD-40 never patented its formula so that “no one would ever know the secret,” and that this choice helped the product remain defensible for decades. This article examines whether that claim is true, what it implies about the strategic trade-off between patenting and secrecy, and how similar logic appears across industrie