When to call out / antagonize potential competitors

My initial guess is, "Don't call out / antagonize potential competitors who have their business in order and could mobilize an effective response."

I should grab quotes from Benioff's book. At Salesforce they tried as much as possible to antagonize the dominant player; I think their reasoning was that any press attention would make up for it.
I think they also reckoned that the existing player was so self-confident that it wouldn't try to replicate the SaaS idea that Salesforce was pushing.

While they were trying to gain power in Germany and afterwards, they antagonized Communists and Jews publicly
However once Hitler got into power he didn't antagonize England / France / Russia; he instead talked about peace with them, until he attacked them by surprise.
He did however seem to antagonize smaller nations that couldn't have defended themselves.

When Leno replaced Carson in 1992, he immediately found himself at odds with Arsenio Hall, whose syndicated late-night show was stealing away younger viewers. After Hall half-joked to Entertainment Weeklyabout his plan to “kick Leno’s ass,” Leno and his producers went nuclear, threatening to ban celebrities from The Tonight Show if they appeared first on Hall’s show. Hall returned fire with a jaw-dropping j’accuse in EW in which he blasted Leno personally for “the two-faced approach of someone I had, until that point, called a friend.” (The two men made up years later.)