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Comment by heisenberg1 | Hacker News Reader

The basic problem is obvious, no company in Germany would pay a fresh PhD more than 150k, even 100k would be extremely. So AI talent leaves. But this is not the whole story, the bureaucracy, regulation and so on are insane. Then you have high taxes, and especially everyone wants to tax the rich. The rich are too rich in Germany. So why should Germany try to make them richer lol?

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This is like poor fighting each other with batons in the mud. The "German rich" fiscally are residents of Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, with some Dutch and Swiss plot twists. No rich has been bred from German fiscal reality in the recent decades.

SAP, Samwer brothers and many people related to Rocket Internet, Frank Thelen and his buddies, Philip (PIP) Klöckner, …

q.e.d.

Samwer brothers without their parents would end up writing PHP in Bucarest. While I appreciate and enjoy Zalando, they'd never succeed as three guys coming to Germany from abroad and launching a business. Wirecard looked fishy in this regards... and indeed it was fishy. The secret sauce as a foreigner and someone not born with silver spoon is capital and resources of Russian intelligence.

You could argue the same with Elon Musk. Just remember he was a given by his Fathers mining business in South Africa. He was doing imposter with Zip2. But he got in early with Peter Thiel and then finally became the Paypal mafia.

Who cares how they made it? Guess this is the German attitude, they got lucky because of their parents. So lets punish them ; )

Anyway there is enough capital and enough rich people to found a company like open AI. Obviously Germany can afford to spend billions on other things...

BTW: Samwer didn't made there money with Zalando. They made their money with a copycat of eBay and then selling it to eBay. They made that with many business. They made copycats of successful US business in other countries and then selling it back. Then they made there money with the Ringtone business. All this was way before Zalando.

Wouldn't consider Frank Thelen rich in the sense it is relevant to AI. You need someone with billions and so on. SAP founders for sure. Anyway agree, Germany has quite a few rich people. Although most of them are a bit under the radar or doing virtue signaling. None of them is willing to take huge risks and invest few billions in a robotic company - just don't see it.

Or Dieter Schwarz, founder of Lidl

Yeah the famous innovators and entrepreneurs Schwarz group. Launched in 1930 and receiving European Bank loans to expand in Eastern Europe.

Hmm.. I was referring to rich Germans not to innovative Germans. That aside the Schwarz Group is building their own Cloud business.. and they were one of the very few large companies that dared to NOT use SAP but build their own stuff. Not sure this counts as innovation but it's worth mentioning.

edit: I just re-read the GP comment and I get it now.. it was only doubting that there are people who recently accumulated riches.. then of course Schwarz would be a bad example :)

> That aside the Schwarz Group is building their own Cloud business

This is dead boring German pragmatism. Once Schwartz group is a competitor of Walmart on the US market, they'll not store data on Amazon.

> and they were one of the very few large companies that dared to NOT use SAP but build their own stuff.

But they (Lidl) paid money to SAP anyway.

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