Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

What big companies have been created in Europe after World War II, that have not been bought or utterly defeated by American or Japanese companies?Because of all these failures, much fanfare was made as Spotify reached a $50B market capitalization in 2020. An art company, so cute!

As of 2023, the LVMH was the most valuable company in Europe by market capitalization^[ref]. Luxury goods. An area of industry that borders between the useless and the evil.

Europe has basically become an outsourcing hub for the United States. The fact that its starts are all sold if they become large enough just means that R&D is also outsourced.

ASML, and perhaps more meaningfully its parent/predecessor ASM International from 1964 is perhaps the biggest exception.

The key problem is that there are so many small countries in Europe, that any startup has to deal with too many incompatible legislation and cannot easily sell to the hole of Europe and scale. So then a larger company from a more uniform country comes and eats it up!

Talent mobility is another issue:

So why can't Europe unify its laws?

Because the countries are still essentially walled off by languages. Europe is the perfect example of why having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

There isn't true mobility of people between countries.

You just can't go study or work in any other country (except for the UK, when it was still in the EU) without putting a huge effort into learning its language first.

Without this, there isn't enough mixing to truly make cultures more uniform, and therefore allow the laws to be more uniform.

Europe can't even unify basic things like:

Equally so, it can't force little fiscal paradises who effectively benefit from being in Europe like Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland ("not European", but should that be allowed?) and Cyprus (the EU can't even maintain its territorial integrity, let alone fiscal) to not offer ridiculously low taxes and incentives which make them entry points for foreign companies to rape Europe.

For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the United Kingdom will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the United States (although at times it seems that it would rather endosymbiose with China instead). On 2025 the British parliament beautifully put it that the country:

Historically, this disunion is partly due to the European balance of power, whereby countries would form alliances with old enemies to prevent another country from taking over. Also linked are failed military unification attempts by Napoleon and Hitler, though we are likely better off without the latter succeeding!!! Though those also partly failed due to wider balance of power issues involving the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and USA, not only due to internal balance. Of course, none of that matters anymore after World War II, where other more unified Europe-sized potencies rose, first the USA and the Soviet Union, and then China, and now European disunion is nothing but a burden.

Evidence such as those makes it clear that the European Union is a failure.

One thing must be said in favour of Europe's mess however: it favours international collaboration in huge projects as a more neutral middle ground. This can be seen more clearly in the ITER and the fiasco that was the Superconducting Super Collider that was cancelled a couple of billion dollars in partly because it failed to attract any foreign investment, compared to the Large Hadron Collider which went on to find the Higgs boson as mentioned at www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supercollider-that-never-was/.

Bibliography:

Marc Verdiell is a French electrical engineer born in 1963 or 1964^[ref] and best known for being the creator and host of the CuriousMarc YouTube channel where he does mind blowing repairs and reverse engineering of vintage computers and other electronic equipment.

Marc made $58.4m from the sale of LightLogic, an optoelectronics company he founded, to Intel in April 2001. This was just after the dot-com crash, but Intel apparently still correctly believed that the networking and the Internet would continue to grow and was investing in the area. His associate Frank Shum sued claiming he should be credited for some of the inventions sold but lost and Marc got it all.^{[ref][ref][ref]}. Marc was then almost immediately appointed an Intel fellow at the extremelly early age of 37, and then stayed for a few years at Intel until 2006 according to his LinkedIn.^[ref][ref]

Marc's LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/marc-verdiell-9742795/

Marc's full name is actualy Jean-Marc Verdiell, but Ciro Santilli remembers there was one YouTube video where he mentions he gave up on "Jean" partly because anglophones would murder its pronounciation all the time.

ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/20160274316 also suggests he may have a seldom used middle name "André", though that would be unusual in French custom

Marc's PhD thesis is listed at: theses.fr/1990PA112048 and it is entitled:which is translated into English as:but the full text is not available online.