Whatever its creators might have thought (and disregarding its currently shitty market cap), Beam is not a competitor of Monero.

Indeed, the most differentiating feature of Beam today, as a privacy blockchain, is its smart contract capabilities (together with its confidential assets, its privacy-preserving NFTs, etc.). Thus, the main usage of the Beam coin is to be "gas" for all kind of privacy DeFi and web3 decentralized applications.

Of course, for that it needs to have some monetary value, but being money is really not its primary reason to exist today. That's really Monero's primary role: to be "sound money".

In a way, Beam is more like a "privacy Ethereum" (as much as we could say that Monero is some sort of "privacy Bitcoin").

Considering the above, my personal view is that for Beam to succeed, it needs to put its capabilities to the service of Monero (the same way that BTC value was put to work through Ethereum DeFi ecosystem). I hope we'll find ways to do so (at least through atomic swaps, but maybe also by bridging XMR onto the Beam chain)...