Europe is already hearing the final signal
Elon Musk is as far into the future as anyone before him. Now he’s setting his sights on Mars. SpaceX’s ambitious mission schedule includes launching unmanned spacecraft to the Red Planet in 2026, and if the plan is successful, the first crewed missions are expected to arrive there in 2028, with the goal of creating a fully self-sustaining city on Mars within the next two decades.
There is no doubt that the arms race of the 21st century will take place in the field of cutting-edge technologies, and as the example of the Silicon Valley hothead shows, nation states are increasingly transferring the role of sovereign to countries that are often much larger, and certainly more agile, multi-corporate.
As if that were not enough, the geographical scissors of modernity are opening wider and wider. The former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Dragi, at the request of the European Commission, prepared a report of almost 400 pages in which he accurately points out the weak point of the Old Continent. Without additional investment, which would mean the need to almost double the EU budget, we will face a “slow agony” and a total loss of competitiveness. The way out is innovation based on mature technologies, combining climate objectives with industrial development and improving the level of security based on domestic resources.
Innovative businesses come from Europe
One would have to be blind not to realise how close we are to the threshold of the next digital revolution, caused by artificial intelligence, which will be intensified by the development of synthetic biology and, in a slightly longer term perspective, quantum processors and memories. The final bell is ringing for Europe, which is still traditionally prosperous. So far, innovative businesses have been largely shut out of the market. In the years 2008-2021, almost 30 per cent. European start-ups with a capitalisation of over one billion dollars have moved their headquarters abroad (the vast majority to the USA). Only four of the 50 largest technology companies in the world are European, and the EU’s global position in this field fell from 22 to 18 per cent between 2013 and 2023, while the US share rose from 30 to 38 per cent.
What went wrong? It’s not about money. Draghi’s report shows that, when EU funds and national budgets are combined, the EU spends more on innovation than the US, which is much better at handling new technologies. Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure in which few new companies are created to “disrupt existing industries or develop new growth engines”. As a result, in the EU, there is not a single company with a market valuation above €100 billion that was founded from scratch in the last 50 years, while all six US companies with a valuation above – note – €1 trillion were founded in this period. We will not be able to break out of this vicious pattern without drastically reducing energy costs, for which EU companies pay more than twice as much as their US competitors.
It is no wonder that the statues of the European economy are starting to tilt in a dangerous direction. The symbol of the German economic miracle, the Volkswagen Group, in order to survive, is forced to find 10 billion euros in savings within three years. Around that time, Mr. Elon’s team is expected to start landing its people on the Red Planet.
