Can Europe build its first trillion-dollar startup?
ft.com
ft.com
(Also, come on, it would be a trillion euro company.)
On the contrary, I think any company that grows that big would be split into smaller companies. This makes sense to me. 100x10b euro companies, or 20x50b (∆) euro companies provides a much higher social benefit than a single behemoth, even if it doesn't make the magical GDP number go exponential. Small companies can be controlled by legislation. Huge companies do the controlling, and that way lies dystopia. Trillion dollar companies are the American dream, not the European one.
(∆) Realistically it wouldn't divide that way of course. The value of the split companies won't equal to potential single huge company, they'll be either higher or lower.
But then again I'm non expert. I do how ever know that the last time we had such's a wealthy companies in the 1600's it didn't do humanity lots of good ;)
It's why Europe is being elft behind technologically compared to the US and also loosing worldwide share of GDP. Thousands of small local companies scattered across several countries can't compete with the scale the likes of FAANG can achieve in the US and worldwide.
In capitalism, companies don't exist to provide a social benefit, that's what the government is for. Companies exist to provide value to the shareholders, that's it. And the US is far better off with those trillion dollar behemoths than without.
The amount of prosperity the US working class sees because of those behemoths puts them at much higher wealth and disposable income than Europeans even after you account for the higher education and healthcare costs.
>even if it doesn't make the magical GDP number go exponential
That "magical GPD number" is also what pays into the welfare services the EU desperately needs. Where do you think the EU will afford that level of welfare if that GPD number will keep stagnating?
This is stated over and over by people who like big companies, like an axiom. And like an axiom, it's impossible to prove - because the only way to prove it would be to compare it against something that doesn't exist, a United States without trillion dollar companies. So you're supposed to just believe it because of how often it's repeated. But I don't believe it, on the contrary, it smells like bullshit to me. It reminds me a lot of another financial axiom we were all supposed to believe: trickle down economics. And look how that turned out.
It ended up with Americans having the highest purchasing power in the world, even after accounting for high education and medical costs.
Like it or not the workers in capitalist America were and are far better off than in countries where Communism was tried. So trickle down did actually work.
That's absolutely the lamest attempt at an argument I've seen all week.
"It ended up with Americans having the highest purchasing power in the world, even after accounting for high education and medical costs."
Uhm, https://www.numbeo.com/ has the US as fifth highest in 2024-mid year and fourth in 2024 overall...
Try to run a venture startup in Germany.
How do you attract and ignite the talent to start a research with that amount of money is out of my understanding.
That's the neat part, you don't. </Omni-Man>