All 70 year old companies is not helping your point.
US has new upstarts like Tesla and Nvidia, which at their prime, add like 1 IKEA per fortnight to their market cap.
US has new upstarts like Tesla and Nvidia, which at their prime, add like 1 IKEA per fortnight to their market cap.
In terms of revenue Bosch is comparable to Nvidia and Tesla. IKEA is about half that and Schwarz is about Nvidia and Tesla combined, but of course those two are bad comparisons because they are in the rather unexciting retail market.
But generally I agree that exciting upstarts that reach fortune 500 size tend to be US companies.
I read an interesting point recently: Austria's 100 wealthiest families have two thirds of the country's wealth, and zero have earned their money from technology; they've all inherited it.
How different would the same list be for Germany? One, perhaps two families earned their fortunes from tech (and by "tech" I mean "SAP")?
Ah yes, feel free to name all the other European startups that are in the right place at the right time with their own technology. Maybe one of these days you'll acknowledge that there may be a reason why such companies keep appearing in the US and East Asia, and not across the Atlantic.
Yes, I know that Nvidia is 30 years old. That does not change my point. Where were the European GPU startups back in the 1990s, let alone today?
(This is where you inevitably cite ASML. Psst: Look into where and who developed ASML's lithography technology, and what companies were not allowed to build off it.)
For starters, there's ARM and STMicroelectronics. Then all the classical household-name businesses like SAAB, Phillips, Nokia, Siemens et. al. However, there's also more recent "SF-style" startups like Spotify, TransferWise and Klarna. Take your pick?
> Where were the European GPU startups back in the 1990s, let alone today?
Imagination Technologies was a pretty big name for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerVR_products
My point is that maybe the US isn't better for causing wildly successful ideas to be rewarded by the market.
The US probably is better for starting tech companies. More rolls of the dice, more chances for success.
But it's not like Nvidia's founders were shopping around for a country to start Nvidia in either. If the Wikipedia history is to be believed, they were already accomplished engineers working at established computing companies in the US, so why would they found Nvidia anywhere else? The web of causality is deeply tangled here. Was the US in the 90s onward actually better for tech startups, or was it a momentum effect carried forward from the US already being a tech and computing leader in the 80s? Maybe a little of both.