Stripe is over 100b and they remain private. Many could’ve bought them along the way. AI has many players worth a ton of money now (openai anthropic etc) which Europe is again entirely asleep at the wheel. Tesla. SpaceX. Even stuff like Waymo. Doesn’t europe have many car companies and they’re behind the curve again in autonomous driving tech AND EV?
We can cope and say tech is full of companies too big to compete against (and that is a cope don’t get it twisted) but it’s not like we have a shortage of massive new companies in the past 20 years alone that aren’t google and apple and amazon…
Sure, but even when companies move to the US it's not really due to "regulation" but because the US is a big coherent market. Sure the EU market technically has more customers, but it's a lot more bureaucratic to expand your business from one EU country to another or to localised it for different EU markets. In the US this is much simpler, and when something is big in the US and has already scaled up its much easier to come back and steamroll the European market.
That's a problem of course, but it's weird to say it's due to Brussels or EU regulation, because a lot of that is de facto deregulation. When you say hey, this is the one rule you have to follow, rather than having to research and comply with various national regulations, that is a lot simpler. The current commission has also promised the possibility of registering a company directly at the EU level to bypass even more national rules.
You do need to research and comply with different regulations in the US, though. Each state is their own entity and has their own taxation, regulations, and requirements for what can be done in what way. It’s just far less unfriendly than europe - hence why companies flock here.
Point is you already have massive established players in europe - the old companies. And even they’re not innovating much. A car company like VW has zero reason to fall behind a start up in the US like tesla or every single Chinese company…
I agree on the car companies being conservative. But it's not like they have no reason to innovate. Regulation was even meant to force them to do so because they just weren't doing so by themselves, and they'd rather spend their money and time lobbying to try and alter or delay regulation or shift costs in the government than just complying or innovating.
As for US states, they technically have different laws, but they have basically the same legal traditions/framework and they largely copy legislation from one another because it's just easier and "tried and true" and because consistency is itself useful. It's not really comparable to Europe (or China where they just have centralised legislation)
It’s also a global market and world at this point, there’s nothing preventing a company in germany from creating OpenAI. There’s nothing stopping any massive european company from spinning out a project into waymo like google did. Spotify became massive and is one of the few successes. Europe just has bad capital markets and worse culture for innovation, there’s certainly SOMETHING significantly wrong that is far more than “well we just aren’t truly united”.
A little bit of column a a little bit of column b. I do agree the capital markets are not really integrated properly so they are worse in that sense at least.
I have certainly experienced plenty of conservative culture and lack of "can do attitude" personally so that's also definitely a part of it. Though I would say Americans are the opposite extreme in that they are delusional and risk-loving, and this leads many to bankruptcy. Each success is basically subsidised by numerous ruined lives that are never compensated for their effort. Maybe a tad less ruined because the US actually allows individual bankruptcy as well.
But I think people who envy the US in this regard and want to be more like them labour under the delusion that it is a pure policy question and they can just make Europe into America 2.0. I don't think that's really true. Again based on working with Europeans. I'm pretty risk averse personally, but even so I'm considerably more "can do" and maybe even risk taking than most Europeans I've met.
Europe's major successes historically have often cone from old money, major companies and government investment. Not always and at all times, but to a significant extent. It's just a more conservative culture like that. Maybe if you absolutely radically changed things while being protectionist you could wipe the slate clean and force people and culture to change at great cost, but it's not really feasible.
Europe is of course not as authoritarian as China by any means, but Germany's export model was backed by government policy and support. France created and maintained its aerospace industry and defence industry through (partial) staye ownerhsip and direction.
But basically the EU has neither the role nor the means to similarly fund or own "European champions" (comparable to Chinese state owned enterprises), while at the same time enforcing neoliberal rules and privatisation on member states, so they're also less able to invest (which makes sense, the common market would fall apart if some country would just get to take it iver with subsidies). Whether you think we've gone too far by having a common market, or simply not far enough, we're in an uncomfortable middle ground where we have a unified enough market to be efficiently taken over by foreigners, but not unified enough and with no centralised enough authority to direct it and make something of it.
Again, Europe is not going to become some "libertarian paradise" any time soon. So we have to play to some extent with the culture we have and the cards we are dealt. Countries can succeed with greater state direction, that's more in line with our traditions, we should embrace it rather than try to be something we are not, at least that attempt has not worked out for the past 50 years, it's a failed experiment in Americanisation if you ask me.
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u/random-meme422 1d ago
Stripe is over 100b and they remain private. Many could’ve bought them along the way. AI has many players worth a ton of money now (openai anthropic etc) which Europe is again entirely asleep at the wheel. Tesla. SpaceX. Even stuff like Waymo. Doesn’t europe have many car companies and they’re behind the curve again in autonomous driving tech AND EV?
We can cope and say tech is full of companies too big to compete against (and that is a cope don’t get it twisted) but it’s not like we have a shortage of massive new companies in the past 20 years alone that aren’t google and apple and amazon…