EURO STOXX 50 would probably be a better benchmark, which has a total market cap of around €4.0T, which is more than any single company. (your general point stands though, it's nowhere near the US market)

Part of that is that you're taking a fixed number of companies. So if Europe has more, but smaller companies, the value of the top-40 would be lower than if they had fewer but larger companies. To me the first sounds healthier, everything else being equal.

Also, lots of large European companies are privately held. For example: IKEA, Schwartz group (Kaufland, Lidl), Bosch, Aldi...

All 70 year old companies is not helping your point.

US has new upstarts like Tesla and Nvidia, which at their prime, add like 1 IKEA per fortnight to their market cap.

I'm not sure if "the market doesn't know how to price Tesla and is rapidly fluctuating up and down" is really saying much.

In terms of revenue Bosch is comparable to Nvidia and Tesla. IKEA is about half that and Schwarz is about Nvidia and Tesla combined, but of course those two are bad comparisons because they are in the rather unexciting retail market.

But generally I agree that exciting upstarts that reach fortune 500 size tend to be US companies.

That's because literally the entire world is betting on their technology right now. I can't imagine that being located in the US is the cause for Nvidia being in the right place at the right time with CUDA.

>That's because literally the entire world is betting on their technology right now. I can't imagine that being located in the US is the cause for Nvidia being in the right place at the right time with CUDA.

Ah yes, feel free to name all the other European startups that are in the right place at the right time with their own technology. Maybe one of these days you'll acknowledge that there may be a reason why such companies keep appearing in the US and East Asia, and not across the Atlantic.

Yes, I know that Nvidia is 30 years old. That does not change my point. Where were the European GPU startups back in the 1990s, let alone today?

(This is where you inevitably cite ASML. Psst: Look into where and who developed ASML's lithography technology, and what companies were not allowed to build off it.)

No, that's a good point. And no, I was not going to cite ASML.

My point is that maybe the US isn't better for causing wildly successful ideas to be rewarded by the market.

The US probably is better for starting tech companies. More rolls of the dice, more chances for success.

But it's not like Nvidia's founders were shopping around for a country to start Nvidia in either. If the Wikipedia history is to be believed, they were already accomplished engineers working at established computing companies in the US, so why would they found Nvidia anywhere else? The web of causality is deeply tangled here. Was the US in the 90s onward actually better for tech startups, or was it a momentum effect carried forward from the US already being a tech and computing leader in the 80s? Maybe a little of both.

Most of ASML's technology was developed at ASML. Yes, not all, and there are US patents. But there was an insane amount of work they did in making it reality (together with Zeiss).

> feel free to name all the other European startups that are in the right place at the right time with their own technology.

For starters, there's ARM and STMicroelectronics. Then all the classical household-name businesses like SAAB, Phillips, Nokia, Siemens et. al. However, there's also more recent "SF-style" startups like Spotify, TransferWise and Klarna. Take your pick?

> Where were the European GPU startups back in the 1990s, let alone today?

Imagination Technologies was a pretty big name for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerVR_products

Nvidia was founded 30 years ago so not exactly new either.

>All 70 year old companies is not helping your point.

I read an interesting point recently: Austria's 100 wealthiest families have two thirds of the country's wealth, and zero have earned their money from technology; they've all inherited it.

How different would the same list be for Germany? One, perhaps two families earned their fortunes from tech (and by "tech" I mean "SAP")?

LEGO too

Because the European capital markets are very different with far less local money going into it, more bank funding etc. The divergence between the US and Europe there is more than 100 years old.