[yawaworht12]

No company is going to have a monopoly of self driving cars. Uber just needs to get them at the same time as everyone else to with either through build or buy. The main reason for doing as much building now is to have a sizable patent portfolio for defensive reasons. Google bought Motorola's patents to protect them while they competed with Apple.

With this in mind, how does anyone else compete without burning through far more money trying to gain market share. Uber burned through the money trying to be efficient when the market was much smaller. Once the market is much much larger, any competitor will have to burn through a orders of maginitude more cash to buy market share.

There's a lot more to succeeding in this market than self driving cars.