This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
I was rummaging this past week through Youtube when I came upon this video below. And I really liked it.
Because the ‘grand plan’ of Elon became a lot clearer.
He wants to more or less do the Apple playbook for AI with his companies. He wants to own the entire ecosystem.
For example…. Tesla is considering a $5bn investment into Elon’s other company, xAI.
Why? Because this AI intelligence will be the competitive advantage in self driving cars that will let him dominate the market.
Whereas others are investing in all kinds of fancy sensors that drive up the cost of the vehicle.. he will be relying mostly just on better AI.
This also means that he’ll innovate and learn much faster. Because he doesn’t rely on any external parties.
If you want to innovate quickly… you need to own the ecosystem. And the same thing goes for how you manage a company in my experience.
Apple decided to own the ecosystem
Apple made what seemed like a crazy decision back in the day – they wanted to control everything. Both hardware and software. The whole ecosystem.
So that’s what they did… they build the hardware, the accessories for it, the operating system, the base software that came with the hardware, and then the appstore to control anyone else’s software that customers wanted to put on it.
While everyone else was partnering up – PC manufacturers with Microsoft, phone makers with Android – Apple basically said “nah, we’re doing this ourselves.”
A lot of people thought they were idiots. It was obviously going to cost a lot more and be a lot more difficult.
They’d have fewer partners to share the risk with. The conventional wisdom was that you should focus on one piece of the puzzle and partner for the rest.
How this ended up being brilliant
Fast forward to today – iPhone has maintained about 21% market share of the crowded smartphone industry since 2007. Do you know how insane that is? In consumer electronics, market leaders typically come and go like seasons changing. But not Apple.
But the picture is even more skewed when you look at it by operating profit share where they’ve got close to 80%!
Same story with MacBooks. They’ve carved out this premium position that nobody can touch.
Why? Because they owned the whole ecosystem. By controlling every part of the consumer experience they made it more seamless and secure.
When they wanted to innovate, they didn’t need to convince partners or wait for them to catch up. They just did it.
Elon’s taking a page out of the Apple playbook
Elon Musk gets this same concept. Look at Tesla – instead of relying on the traditional auto industry supply chain, they make pretty much everything themselves.
SpaceX? Same story. They build most of their components in-house, which is how they’ve managed to cut rocket launch costs by like 90%.
Now he’s doing it again with xAI. He knows that to win the self-driving car race, Tesla needs its own AI capabilities. You can’t rely on partnering with someone else for that critical piece.
Which is why you saw the recent headline of Tesla potentially investing $5billion into the relative AI newcomer, xAI.
I’ve also seen that owning the ecosystem is key
This is also exactly what I’ve found with the Beast Method. It works best when you control the whole ecosystem.
When you can dictate exactly how it’s implemented. When you can ensure everyone stays disciplined to the process. When you can quickly correct anyone who starts to drift.
I’ve tried implementing it in situations where I only controlled part of the ecosystem, and it just doesn’t work as well. Other teams become bottlenecks because they’re not following the same system.
Discipline falls apart.
The value curve starts to flatten instead of continuing to compound the way it would if you owned the entire ecosystem.
To own the ecosystem you need leverage
Now, owning the ecosystem doesn’t necessarily mean you need to own the company (though that’s definitely ideal). But you can’t just be the “process guy” either.
You need to be the boss. The person who can look at someone’s work and tell them “this isn’t good enough, do it again.” Just like Elon, you need to be in the details.
This is actually why it’s pretty hard for me to train other people to run things like this. I spent 20+ years in strategy consulting, corporate and tech leadership roles.
A pure ‘project manager’ doesn’t have that background. They end up just being a reminder service to people, and that usually doesn’t work.
And the people that do have that level of experience typically already have a set way of working that is hard to change.
It’s also a lot easier to do if you’re starting something from scratch
I’ve always found it WAY easier to start with the Beast Method than to implement it later. This isn’t just true of process changes – it goes deeper than that.
It’s about the type of people you hire. It’s about the culture you create from day one.
Trying to change people’s habits and culture after the fact? That’s like trying to teach an old dog new tricks. Sometimes it works, but it’s usually painful as hell for everyone involved.
And when people don’t change you need to let them go. Which is difficult if they are employees.
Closing thoughts
Look at the companies that were once dominant but declined. Often it was because they relied too heavily on other parts of the ecosystem they didn’t control. This slowed their ability to innovate and adapt.
The same holds true for managing a company. If you want the most value out of the Beast Method… you need to own the ecosystem of how the company operates.
Do that and the value compounds over time.
It becomes not just a company operating system… it becomes your culture.
