The Big Tech was in the viewfinder of the Biden administration. She adorned all the blows of Lina Khan, the president of the Competition Authority, the FTC. The term techlashthe return of stick against tech, entered the dictionary in 2019 about the ravages of social networks and accusations of massive surveillance, disappeared from conversations. Who remembers the gallery in the New York Times Entitled “It is time to dismantle Facebook” and signed with the very hand of Chris Hughes, one of the co -founders of the platform?
Under the leadership of Elon Musk and the investor Peter Thiel, the sector has become one of the most powerful influence groups of the Trump second mandate, having JD Vance Vice-President and David Sacks Minister of Intelligence appoint artificial and cryptocurrencies. Tech national champions are now playing a key role in the America First strategy. Even Meta, Trump Nemesis for his supposed support for the Democrats in 2020, was rehabilitated after Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of his internal policies centered on diversity and inclusion. To oppose these giants is now to oppose America.
These mentors have aroused a generation of entrepreneurs
It is reassuring to demonize these companies or their leaders by ignoring that they represent an industry with millions of talents, American as foreigners, and an entrepreneurial culture shaped for decades. In 2005, Elon Musk’s ex-colleague at Paypal, Peter Thiel, launched his fund, Founders Fund, at the very moment when English Paul Graham created the Incubator Y Combinator. With the Venture Hacks blog Imagined in 2007 by the Ravikant naval entrepreneur, these mentors aroused a generation of entrepreneurs to the principles of ultra -fast growth and the balance of power in the face of investors. During this period, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of Netscape and Opsware, make their weapons of Business Angels Before setting up, in 2009, their own funds, A16Z. He will become in fifteen years the largest investment capital fund in the world. From these crazy years will be born Airbnb (2007), Bitcoin (2008), Uber (2009), Stripe (2010), Doordash (2012), Coinbase (2012) or Databricks (2013). Today, the United States has 267 listed companies under 50 years of age which are worth more than $ 10 billion, when the European Union aligns only 14. Together, they weigh $ 31,000 billion, including 23 000 for the technological sector, against 445 billion for the old continent.
Is this delay made up? Hardly. China has shown that a protectionist policy subtracting the Internet with the winds of competition makes it possible to bring out local giants, like Tencent, Alibaba, Pin Duo Duo, Meituan, JDD, Baidu or even Bytedance. But it will be more difficult to rebuild an indigenous software industry in Europe, as the essential infrastructures of the cloud are now centralized in the United States. Not to mention the fact that the EU is made up of a multitude of markets, with strong cultural and regulatory barriers at the entrance.
Is European starting essential? Yes, it’s even a matter of survival. Inspired by Musk’s successes with Tesla and SpaceX, a handful of experienced entrepreneurs is tackling the manufacturing industry today, starting from the principle that these cars, rockets or reactors are above all software in an object that We can radically rethink the design. They are called Andundil, Commonwealth Fusion or Figure and you will soon hear about them. They will cut deales to existing industrialists, whether American or European. Across the Atlantic, it will be a creative destruction here, a mass extinction.
On the ruins of the Internet bubble
Reducing this domination to the genius of a few individuals is a doubtful shortcut because it suggests that fate is played out by few things, even though structural forces have been at work for a long time. We must first accept the idea, counter-intuitive, that a speculative bubble is a benefit. In the United States, venture capital investment increased from $ 7 to 120 billion between 1995 and 2000. In the same year, Europe caps at 25 billion. This exceptional effort (1.2 % of GDP) generates enormous waste. Who remembers e-commerce sites PETS.COM, Webvan or Etoys, the Kozmo.com home delivery service, from Theglobe.com? Less than 1 in 4 listed on the NASDAQ in 2000 still exists today as an independent entity. What does it matter: in technology, having a wide base is the best way to compensate for attrition. The same scheme is repeated today on artificial intelligence while the United States is preparing to engulf $ 1,000 billion in the Data Centers to support the Wave of AI.
On the still burning ruins of the Dotcom bubble, the survivors quickly pushed their advantage. Google and Salesforce joined on the stock market in 2004, when Amazon Web Services generalizes the Cloud Computing. Still in 2004, Facebook was born in a dormitory in Harvard and a young entrepreneur, Elon Musk, invests his added value from Paypal in the acquisition of a small car manufacturer created a year earlier, Tesla.
In Europe, the Riposte patina. However, there are people in Reims, this August 30, 2005. The President of the Republic is back to political school with the installation of the industrial innovation agency in the Champagne city. The opportunity for Jacques Chirac to recall his attachment to Quaero. Quaero is this European internet search engine, developed by Thomson and Deutsche Telekom to compete with Google and Yahoo. “We are involved in a global competition for technological supremacy,” warns, with Precience, the head of state.
A few months earlier, a report ordered from former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok has however buried “Lisbon’s strategy” which was to make the European Union in 2010 “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy of the world “. We are therefore in 2005, the Internet comes down to telephone operators, who deploy high speed, and e-commerce sites. In this area, Europe seems to catch up. Online sales, which were 3 to 4 times lower than in the United States in 1999, are only 2 times, driven by the adoption of the euro and the simplification of cross-border transactions. The great financial crisis of 2008 arrives, precipitated by the fall of Lehman Brothers: Europeans think that the time of America is over, even though it is the old continent which will pay the high price, between explosion of sovereign debts and austerity policies. At the end of the crisis, the omnipotence of American actors is brilliant. And for good reason: access to data is now locked.
The Big Tech Hunting in packs
In June 2011, Google President Eric Schmidt said that a quartet of businesses now run technology. Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook have perfectly exploited the platform strategy. In France, the acronym GAFA emerges. Less than a year later, it is found in an information report of the Senate which complains … of the erosion of the tax bases. Fleur Pellerin, then Minister of the Digital Economy, laments the absence of a European GAFA. The term will become GAFAM with the addition of Microsoft, but it will never really pierce in the United States which will prefer that of Big Tech, in echo at the Big Oil – Les éaguiers – and Big Tobacco – Cigarette manufacturers. This semantic difference is interesting. Big Tech is not a reduction to a few entities but the designation of an entire sector, which hunts in packs.
The platforms which serve as access to the Internet then quickly realize that they can reach an unprecedented size where those offering services or physical goods are limited. Google’s search engine was accessible in 100 languages just six years after its creation. In Silicon Valley, this scale effect becomes a mantra. More customers mean more financial resources, therefore more jobs and dividends. But the story could have stopped there if the generation of entrepreneurs of the 1990s had not forced the sacrosanct consensus shareholder. Jeff Bezos imposes on its shareholders years of lean cows because it reinvests all of Amazon’s profits, especially in the data centers. Sergey Brin and Larry Page follow the advice of Warren Buffet and create two categories of Google shares, which leaves them most of the voting rights with only 16 % of the titles. Mark Zuckerberg copies this dual structure during the introduction of Facebook on the Nasdaq in 2012. Steve Jobs, president of Apple until 2011, had suspended all dividend since 1996. If Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, Resolves to pay in 2012, he warns his shareholders that the bet to make his graphics cards processors for artificial intelligence models will take at least a decade.
Ingenious acquisitions
This constant reinvestment of profits supports a research effort and development of an ever seen. In 2010, Google created Google X, a fund for funding revolutionary projects. Many have failed, but among the successes are Waymo, the leader in autonomous cars in the United States, Deepmind and Google Brain. These are the teams of these two entities that have forged the concept of transformersprecursors of extended language models and therefore generative artificial intelligence. The two companies today at the forefront in the space conquest, SpaceX and Blue Origin, were founded respectively in 2002 and 2000 by Musk and Bezos. Two long -term visionaries.
The important cash flows generated by these giants, combined with the high assessment of the stock market markets over the period 2005-2015, finally allow them to multiply acquisitions. These are mainly part of a conglomeral logic, in other words absorb a company that sells another service, rather than horizontal – buy a competitor – or vertical – buy a supplier. This choice signs the second act of resistance in the sector to the financial markets which had acted the ineffectiveness of the conglomerate. However, Big Tech is not a simple swallowing machine. Google is deemed to have achieved one of the most profitable buyouts in history with YouTube. Its cost? $ 1.7 billion in exchange for titles while this division now generates 50 billion in revenue per year. But the path since the zero income of 2006 is to be credited to the parent company: she has never stopped investing in her nugget.
.