I'm a fan and investor in Tesla, but there's 3 parts to winning the ridesharing, autonomous, BEV future and the most important part is the role that Uber has right now which is the customer-ridesharing-relationship. The platform technology is going to largely escalate in multiple places simultaneously and thus be the commodity bit. It is definitely an advantage to Tesla if they manage to get the hardware\software right via Tesla Network with a 2-3 year headstart, but the capital required to expand is so high that this head-start is less substantial than say a Facebook style adoption curve. It'll be a battle. We'll see.

That's like saying, if you make cars, why let Avis take the profits from renting them out? In both cases, because that car related business (rentals or ride hailing apps) is outside your core specialty.

May the most efficient vertically integrated conglomerate win then.

So to play devil's advocate if that's how you believe things will play out... what happens to the existing car companies once new car sales start dropping precipitously? There are more car manufacturers that will be fighting over the same shrinking pie of new car sales than there are global TNCs. Their valuations will likely drop to the point where they could become an acquisition target for Uber. The only competitive advantage Tesla has is in batteries, and that will likely become a commodity insofar as TNCs are concerned far before it's a competitive advantage. The daily driving distances a battery needs to support for TNC use is a lot lower than an individual looking to do long road trips.

Uber won't last long enough to acquire a traditional automaker before technology creates a death spiral for those automakers. I'm wrong if they can find additional investors willing to gamble on the expected duration of time till that happens (~5 years at least).

Tesla has a product people will buy today (with ~25% margins!), as well as a team to transition to ridesharing in the future. They're collecting millions of miles per day of autopilot data and that'll only increase with the model 3 rollout.