Some startup decisions do not optimize a market. They end it. Elad Gil identifies five concrete moves that can eliminate competition entirely: merging with your main competitor, buying a key supplier, locking in a critical distribution deal, destroying an incumbent's cash cow, and deploying capital at a scale rivals cannot match. The historical cases are specific. Microsoft's OS contract with IBM in the early days of the PC. Google's billions spent buying early search distribution. Uber merging its Chinese subsidiary with Didi in 2016 and its Russian operations with Yandex rather than fighting indefinitely in markets it could not win.
The most actionable part of this piece is not the taxonomy. It is the underlying logic: private-to-private mergers between fierce competitors are possible before regulators or ego calcify everything. Three friction points kill most of them, relative ownership post-merger, leadership control, and founder grudges. TikTok buying traffic at scale to saturate a network-effect market is the capital playbook in its rawest form. The current LLM oligopoly, where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind each require tens of billions to stay competitive, is the same move playing out in slow motion right now.
Gil's closing prompt is worth sitting with: can you convince a public company to spin out a subsidiary and merge it with you? Can you set aside founder ego to stop a war of attrition? The piece is short and the list is not exhaustive, but the framing forces a category of strategic thinking most operators never run. Read it for the Uber-Didi mechanics and the footnote on why competitor mergers almost always collapse before they close.
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