> It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for that is.
There isn't a singular reason, it's a complex combination. Btw I'd like to preface this to say I'm not sure most Europeans actually want a Google or a Meta, there is aversion to "too big to fail" companies in most sectors.
* investment money - VCs bet on tons of stupid things with the hope of some of them making it. Many a crappy business model has received hundreds of millions of investments to try and make it, and companies spend years chasing growth on the back of those investments without worrying about profitability. Investment in the EU is usually more conservative and grounded in reality - a business model of "we'll give it away at a loss for 10 years to get lots of market share and then increase prices to capture the market" simply won't fly here.
* "Europe" isn't a single market in most important senses of that word. Each EU country has it's own language (okay there's some overlap like Czech and Slovak, Belgium and France/Netherlands, Ireland and UK before Brexit, but generally), laws, regulations. A single business can't just immediately serve the whole of the EU without doing due diligence, translations, checking what regulations might apply for them, etc. That means that the size of the potential market is limited from the start without extra investment. A French startup can only sell in France until they figure out what is needed to sell in the Spanish market, translate websites/products, hire support people that speak Spanish, etc. etc. etc. There are tons of good quality decently successful European startups, but most stay within one or a few countries. Exceptions are purely digital companies such as Spotify who can afford to sell all around the world with relatively few hurdles.
* Regulations and common decency/fear - over here, a business model of "we'll fake sell medical devices" or "we'll trick people into giving us all their movements/desires/internet history and sell that to whoever wants it" will hardly fly. Not that there aren't unscrupulous people here, there are, but it'd be harder to get investment and talent to work for you.
* Better... I'm going to go with social safety net, but that's only a part of it. Over here, people are generally more content and know they have things to fall back on, including retirement. FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), "grind mindset", "hustle mindset" and similar are quite rare here. People prioritise other things than work, don't live to work, and don't measure themselves (only) on work. So hustling to hit big and become massive is much more rarely seen as a good or desired thing.
People often deride the EU for "lacking innovation", but IMO that's flat out wrong - those people use wrong measurements (lack of massive tech giants) to define innovation. There are tons of European startups and scaleups and mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes that are successful and innovative. They're just not "infinite growth" global behemots, but.. do they need to be? Is that the thing that ultimately matters?