Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true.

This sounds like an oversimplification and assumes "big" is on par with net good.

That implies that the goal is to create big companiea.

Really? Your rhetoric seems to miss a LOT of new global businesses, as well as older ones that are much bigger than ever before.

Spotify, Wise, Adyen, DeepMind just off the top of my head, but there are loads more.

The fact that you don’t know about them is because many tech bros in the USA are pretty parochial and haven’t been exposed to international businesses or indeed tech.

It's always wild to me how people perceive Europe. In left-wing academia there is this term "neoliberal encasement" that discusses in detail how neoliberal capitalism isolates the economy from democracy. The EU is sort of the end stage of this idea, economic policy is detached from democratic comtrol to such a degree that member states submit their draft budgets to unelected technocrats in Brussels for approval before "voting" on it. Imagine if IMF economists were to run the economies of a continent, that's what the EU is. It's staggering how completely the opposite of valuing people's intrinsic incentives this model is, but I get where you are coming from of course everybody thinks that, it's just still wild to me how they managed that narrative so well.