Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.

What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.

A lot of US wealth is fake wealth in the stock market which is propped up by artificial money printing. EU wealth is real wealth, mostly outside of the stock market and hidden from view.

Any stock could be artificially propped up to be worth 1 trillion dollars. Just issue 1 billion shares and trade a tiny subset of those shares (e.g. only 1000 shares) at $1000 per share each day; there you have your trillion dollar company (since market cap is price per share times number of shares). You only need $1 million in cash to pull off this scheme. You just need to make sure that the vast majority of shares are kept off the market. This is not as difficult to achieve as it seems. The reason it's fake wealth is because none of the billionaire shareholders can cash out more than 100k in a day without massively crashing their net worth unless the money printer comes to the rescue at just the right time.

Putting all your eggs in one basket with a handful of extremely large companies might not be a long term winning strategy. Companies fail eventually. Big companies are no exception. When they do, things get ugly.

The FANG companies are great at hoarding wealth but not so great at converting that wealth into new things. You need small, nimble companies for that. And not necessarily the VC funded Silicon Valley variety. Which of course is basically the FANG companies (and their clique of wealthy investors) trying to own and monopolize the future.

A dynamic you see in Germany where I currently live that I find very interesting is that of family owned businesses thriving and adapting to modern times every few decades. Germany has a lot of very wealthy families and some of these businesses are multi billion euro companies that you probably have heard off and there are loads more that you may not have heard off that are also worth billions.

Lately some of these companies are discovering the virtues of going online with their business. You might argue a few decades too late. But we are talking real businesses, with real markets, real customers, and real profits, real products, etc. They'll be fine. They are simply adapting and integrating commodities like the internet and making it their own. In some cases they simply skip a few steps and fast forward to what many other companies might still consider science fiction. Some of them make it work and prosper, some don't. And they disappear or get replaced by something more successful. It's organic, highly adaptive, chaotic, and competitive. You might even say that this is capitalism actually working.

Some of those commodities are provided by the above mentioned FANG companies. But how crucial are they really long term? Amazon is nice and all but it's basically just a logistics company with a side business of running cloud based services (or the other way around). I've used both and it's fine. But I also use competing services and products. Amazon being big doesn't make them better at what they do. Often it's the opposite actually. Bureaucratic, slow to adapt, not able to tap into opportunities when the payoff isn't measured in billions/trillions, etc. It takes more agile/nimble companies to do that. You find these companies all over the world.

It has problems. If you have an idea that will take you a year to develop with 10 people, you need one million up front (simplifying a lot). But if the investors only give you 250k, they you need to spend time working on getting that missing 750k which will dilute your focus from the product you actually want to build. But the initial investor will still want that product.

I definitely think that there is some middle ground to find between not being able to rise money for any project, and being able to get 100M funding for a juicer.

You are exaggerating as you say yourself, but these things are mostly not issues at all. You just hire people (and that does not cost much: made a company including employees a few weeks ago for 1000E first year including accounting and payroll, no work from me; if 1000E is an issue, maybe do something else) to handle them, and, you put some provisions in for the stuff you mention, like in the US, to use your ranting language, you do for the over the top insane crazy bonkers legal crap you have there and find normal. At least paying some poor sod I have to fire a few months more does not keep me up at night as I know this upfront. Legal shit does but that's not relevant in the EU (sue me, see where that goes). You are used to the one, I am to the other.

The real EU problem is on the one hand conservative nature: almost no way to get significant investment here without actually proving you already (before you started!) can pay it back 10x. And then what you rightly say: this is not a union (yet): most countries just don't mesh and the language and culture barriers are somewhat crippling. Not how you say because those barriers do not exist anymore for decades already. Not like the current US yet but things take time: think you had some civil war and such. We are still recovering from border altering world wars and some idiots cutting up this continent like it was a cake after. Let's give half to an idiot Russian dictator and let's not bother to remove Franco. This takes time. Unless you install an actual dictator for the entire thing, this takes time in any place.

Not sure if these will be solved ever but not in my lifetime.

And another cultural thing: I like free time: that you do not probably means something you might want to discuss with someone, but working all hours of the day is something I do not miss and do not wish on anyone.

And as last point: what company do you run or what is your yearly turnover? Because, besides all your ranting, there is the real meat. How is the great US of A working out for your personally with all its blessings? Because I am afraid it will be slightly disappointing after all this. I mean with my 8 weeks a month vacation I have time to write tripe like this, but you...