My grandmother used to say, "the Americans are going to space while we're just growing butt-hair". She was so close!

Butt hair is not that bad if you compare to European promoted tech leaders:

There is Microsoft, we have Qwant.

There is Claude and DeepSeek, we have Mistral (originally a copy-paste of LLaMA stolen by employees, now a fork of DeepSeek, with a few changes).

Then there is ASML and Airbus, alone on their island of innovation.

We have LIDL too, so not everything is bad.

If it wouldn’t be that bad why European companies prefer the US.