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How Tesla and SpaceX Help Their Competitors — And Why It Works | Taha Abbasi
Taha Abbasi··3 min read
How Tesla and SpaceX Help Their Competitors — And Why It Works
In a clip from the New York Times DealBook Summit that has resurfaced with 7.7 million views, Elon Musk explained a philosophy that contradicts every instinct in corporate America: Tesla open-sourced its patents, offered free Supercharger technology to competitors, and SpaceX does not use patents at all. For Taha Abbasi, this strategy is not altruism — it is the most sophisticated competitive moat in modern business.
The conventional wisdom in corporate strategy is to build walls: patents, trade secrets, proprietary standards, locked ecosystems. Apple does it. Qualcomm does it. Every pharmaceutical company does it. Yet Tesla and SpaceX have chosen the opposite approach, and both companies are dominating their industries. As a technology executive who has built products reaching fifteen million users, Taha Abbasi recognizes that this is not generosity — it is genius.
The NACS Victory: Open Standards Win Markets
Tesla’s decision to open its North American Charging Standard (NACS) connector to competitors seemed like a gift to the competition. Why would Tesla share its charging technology with Ford, GM, Rivian, and every other EV maker? The answer became clear within months: by making NACS the industry standard, Tesla transformed its Supercharger network from a Tesla-only advantage into the backbone of American EV infrastructure.
Every non-Tesla EV that plugs into a Supercharger pays Tesla for the electricity. Every NACS adapter sold is revenue for Tesla. Every car manufacturer that adopts NACS is implicitly acknowledging Tesla’s technical superiority. The open standard strategy turned a proprietary asset into a platform that generates revenue from competitors while reinforcing Tesla’s dominance.
SpaceX: No Patents, No Problem
Taha Abbasi finds SpaceX’s approach even more radical. In an industry where patents are standard defensive weapons, SpaceX deliberately avoids filing them. Musk’s reasoning is straightforward: SpaceX’s primary competitor in rocket technology is China, and Chinese companies are not deterred by American patents. Filing patents merely provides a detailed blueprint of SpaceX’s innovations to competitors who will ignore the legal protections anyway.
Instead, SpaceX relies on execution speed as its moat. By the time a competitor reverse-engineers a Raptor engine design, SpaceX has already iterated to the next version. The company’s competitive advantage is not in what it knows — it is in how fast it learns and deploys. No patent filing can replicate that.
The Ecosystem Effect
Both strategies share a common logic: when you are confident in your ability to execute faster than anyone else, helping competitors actually helps you. Tesla’s open patents accelerated EV adoption, which increased demand for batteries, which drove down battery costs, which made Tesla’s vehicles more affordable. SpaceX’s open approach attracted talent who wanted to work in a culture of radical transparency rather than legal paranoia.
As Taha Abbasi sees it, this is the difference between finite and infinite game thinking. Finite players optimize for today’s competitive position. Infinite players optimize for the size and health of the entire market, confident that their execution advantage will capture the largest share of a growing pie. Musk plays the infinite game better than anyone in technology.
Lessons for Every Industry
The Tesla and SpaceX approach is not universally applicable — it requires genuine execution superiority to work. But for companies confident in their ability to innovate faster than competitors, open strategies create larger markets, attract better talent, build goodwill, and generate revenue from the very competitors they are enabling.
Taha Abbasi believes more technology companies will adopt this approach as they realize that the biggest risk is not competition — it is market stagnation. Open standards, open patents, and open collaboration grow markets faster than walled gardens, and in growing markets, the best executors win.
More analysis at Tesla’s competitive moat analysis and the Tesla ecosystem effect.
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About the Author: Taha Abbasi is a technology executive, CTO, and applied frontier tech builder. Read more on Grokpedia | YouTube: The Brown Cowboy | tahaabbasi.com
Taha Abbasi
Engineer by trade. Builder by instinct. Explorer by choice.
