Isn’t that quite telling? Nvidia’s market cap sits above the entire UK equity market, Microsoft’s above France and Germany.

Isn’t that quite telling? Nvidia’s market cap sits above the entire UK equity market, Microsoft’s above France and Germany. A few American companies now outweigh the entire stock markets of major European states. Europe still trains strong engineers and scientists. What systematically discourages growth and innovation is the business environment. Layered regulation, data rules, the AI Act, sector-specific mandates, and slow permitting raise the fixed cost of trying anything large. High marginal taxes and repeated calls for wealth or “excess profit” levies shift capital from investment and innovation toward preservation and exit. A redistribution-first instinct treats outsized returns as a problem to be corrected rather than evidence that customers valued what was built. Founders and capital notice, they incorporate, innovate, and hire where upside is allowed to compound, not punished by overregulation and taxation. The chart is the cumulative result of those choices, not a one-off accident of the last business cycle. The AI revolution will only widen the gap between the US and Europe, which will become an open-air museum for wealthy Americans and Asians.

— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) October 8, 2026