Can France Create Its Own MIT?

They are missing an important structural point: MIT isn't really a school, it's a huge government research lab with a small school attached (look at the budget for which education is about 14% of revenues and 16% of expenditures). Research is primary (whereas, as some other comments have noted, it has atrophied in the French Grandes Écoles). They need another INRIA in the mix -- though not INRIA itself; that excellent institution would not survive merging with these others.

FWIW I am an MIT graduate who has lived and worked in research in the USA and France

> Why does it seem like so many relevant tech companies are American

The ones that are relevant to you.

To me all but very few of the relevant tech companies are irrelevant, and the miracle of Silicon Valley has not been replicated inside the USA either. So the reason those companies are American is because SV is in the United States, it has little to do with America as a whole, if it did then Silicon Valley would not be an exception within the United States.

Euro nations as a rule are not hostile to start-ups in any way that is different from say Texas or Michigan.

Then, finally, there are a large number of relevant EU tech start-ups. They are working from a slight disadvantage (need to market/sell immediately in a whole bunch of languages if they want to escape their home-territory) but plenty of them do well enough that they end up listed on stock-exchanges all over the planet.

That they are not relevant to you is another matter, but IT companies account for a huge percentage of EU employment and they're all doing stuff that they feel is relevant.

So it looks as if your argument mostly revolves around what you think is relevant and what isn't.

The only American company I can't seem to get around is Google, and they're a one-off even by US standards.

Apple, FB, MS, Twitter and so on can all be done without (at least: I could do without them).

On the hardware front that leaves Intel and AMD, neither of which could be classed as start-ups today any more than you could class Siemens or Sony as one.

TomTom TeamViewer Skype Adyen Takaway.com Zalando Hellofresh and many many more...

I can't tell you it's the same cause, but you can see this phenomenon in many industries, such as entertainment. After WWII, the U.S. was the only wealthy country left untouched and it dominated the world. Around half of world GDP was produced in the U.S. (an astounding number); all the leading scholars and scientists had moved to the U.S. (for example, think of the language and the location of pre- and post-WWII physics); the U.S. also became the world's dominant military and political power, as well as the leading cultural power (from democracy and human rights to Hollywood films to jazz to Elvis). As a result, if you wanted to be a world leader in almost anything, you had to do it in the U.S.

Also, the international language of (seemingly) everything became English, from science to, importantly in this context, computer code. When a Finnish graduate student created his new operating system, the code and his announcement were in English. Assuming you are a native English-speaker, imagine if programming languages, HTML, and network traffic were in French - how many fewer English-speakers would step over that hurdle and learn to code, to hack? How many teenagers would give it a try out of curiosity if they have to learn another language to do it? Imagine you are a French musician; what is the chance that a song you record in French will be heard in the U.S. or worldwide? Ever hear a French song in the U.S.? See French musicians on major tours in the U.S.? Can Americans name one French musician? But can people in France name American musicians? Do English-speaking U.S. musicians tour France? All the time, AFAIK.

Those things persist today, U.S. businesses still have an economic advantage; they can sell to an internal market of 320 million people, all in one language - and at ~$19 trillion annual GDP the largest internal market in the world by far (not counting the EU, which is a complicated topic). Then they can sell to another 100 million+ in other wealthy, English-speaking countries, and then to the rest of the world accustomed to hearing pop songs in English and watching movies in English. A French business has similar access to 60 million, plus part of Canada.

IME, Americans often don't realize how the modern world was built around them.

This is a cynical take, but, roughly speaking, in Europe, there are workers rights, and in the US, employment is at-will.

The US systems tilts the scales toward stronger employees. So, the more marketable your skills are, the more incentive you have to move to SV.

A slightly less offensive take on the situation is that, if you stay in Europe, you won’t be destitute, but you won’t get rich either.

However, note that there are many articles on HN that attempt to quantify this effect by looking at economic mobility. The consensus is that Europe is becoming more of a meritocracy and in the US, economic status is increasingly determined at birth.