Comment by joe_mamba
7 hours ago
The question is why doesn't Germany have any young upstart auto companies when the US and China do? The question being the rhetorical kind.
7 hours ago
The question is why doesn't Germany have any young upstart auto companies when the US and China do? The question being the rhetorical kind.
Extreme over-regulation/regulatory capture. If you do anything worth doing in Germany and one of the established players doesn't like it, they find some reason to arrest you or raid your company and shut it down. As a result, people are afraid of doing things unless there's an explicit government-approved path to doing that exact thing. You can open a restaurant because there's a process for opening restaurants, but if you want to do something off the beaten path, its a bad idea.
It's not like the US has that many either. It's not the kind of winner-takes-all network effects industry that attracts venture capital outside of the Musk reality distortion field.
>It's not like the US has that many either.
Math was never my strong point, but AFAIK the "not that many" of the US is still a greater number than the zero of Germany.
If you look at the greater NW European area there were (are still?) several startups, non got big enough to matter and they did not have infinite money to survive like some US based PE funded ones can. And even for Germany a quick "car startup germany" search will give you a few.
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Access to capital, mostly. The US has always been willing to grant hefty amounts of taxpayer money to startups, something culturally foreign to Germany (startups are risky, Germans don't want taxpayer money to be spent on risky adventures that might bring losses) and the US also has dozens of billions of dollars a month in 401k pension savings making their way into the asset markets.
And China, well, it's a dictatorship with effectively unlimited foreign currency reserves. They can do whatever they want.
> The US has always been willing to grant hefty amounts of taxpayer money to startups
Care to elaborate? I was under impression that absolute majority of startups in US are fully funded by a (private) venture capital. There are (were?) some exceptions like tax reductions on "green" projects, but they were not restricted to startups/small companies in any way.
> I was under impression that absolute majority of startups in US are fully funded by a (private) venture capital.
Tesla got a shitload of government funding, including a 465 million dollar loan [1]. SpaceX was effectively funded by NASA in its early days. In total, the Muskverse alone got 38 billion dollars [2]. Bezos' Blue Origin got at least 1.5 billion dollars [3].
Sure, by number most startups are fully privately funded. But that doesn't mean the US government isn't willing to help things along, at least for those well connected. And on top of that come government research grants to universities who then spin off companies and keep the profits from the spinoffs.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-paid-off-teslas-193...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/117956/documents/...
[3] https://thehill.com/lobbying/5113500-bottom-line-bezos-blue-...
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>Access to capital, mostly.
German auto makers were wealthier than the US auto makers. Germany's GDP is now third in the world. There is capital.
>Germans don't want taxpayer money to be spent on risky adventures
But they wanted it to be spent on Russian gas pipelines, foreign aid, anti nuclear activism, and in the pockets of politically connected multinationals like T-systems to build another "government digitalization project" while their internet speed lacks behind developing nations?
>that might bring losses
If they hate losses, why do they keep losing? Germany decline in past 15 years seems like its a self fulfilling prophecy. The more risk averse they are to avoid change or losses, the more they keep losing to economies who embraced change, disruption and risk.
> German auto makers were wealthier than the US auto makers. Germany's GDP is now third in the world. There is capital.
The problem is, that capital is stuck in the bank accounts of the uber rich.
> But they wanted it to be spent on Russian gas pipelines, foreign aid, anti nuclear activism, and in the pockets of politically connected multinationals like T-systems to build another "government digitalization project" while their internet speed lacks behind developing nations?
- Nordstream was privately funded, half by Gazprom, half by a consortium of privately owned large utilities
- Germany has drastically cut back on foreign aid funding, which in return killed off a lot of the goodwill Germany enjoyed in the Global South, we all know that China and Russia filled the gap. The numbers go up in theory but that's only due to funding for Ukraine.
- Anti-nuclear activism never got significant amounts of funding, instead dealing with the nuclear waste costs 1.4 billion euros a year, only 400 million euros are actually going towards the environment [1].
The only point you actually got somewhat correct is
> in the pockets of politically connected multinationals like T-systems to build another "government digitalization project" while their internet speed lacks behind developing nations?
The problem is, again, risk avoidance. Public tenders are written to prefer established players like SAP, T-Systems et al that can prove decades of experience in government projects. Partially that is due to incompetence, partially it is to shrink the bidder pool and avoid the risk of getting entire projects held up for years by lawsuits of bidders who lost.
The lack of internet speed doesn't come from a lack of public investment. Telekom has been privatized for decades. The problem here is regulatory incompetence.
> Germany decline in past 15 years seems like its a self fulfilling prophecy. The more risk averse they are to avoid change or losses, the more they keep losing to economies who embraced change, disruption and risk.
Agreed. The b00mer brainrot runs heavy here.
[1] https://taz.de/Budget-des-Umweltministeriums/!6102402/
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