Where did you get this from? Germany is actually the only country in the EU where GDP per capita is higher when the capital is excluded. Munich is at 80,000€, Frankfurt (Main) 95,000€, Hamburg 60,000€, Berlin 40,000€ [1].
Germany is highly federated, with large companies near or in small towns or cities that only exist because the company was founded there decades or centuries ago.
You are talking about tech but this is about Tesla. I don't get why people are still treating Tesla like a tech company. They are making cars that happen to have some driving assistance. By that metric VW, BMW, and Daimler are also tech companies, each way larger than Tesla by cars sold, people employed, and GDP impact. Tesla is as much tech as WeWork was tech.
> Germany is actually the only country in the EU where GDP per capita is higher when the capital is excluded. Munich is at 80,000€, Frankfurt (Main) 95,000€, Hamburg 60,000€, Berlin 40,000€ [1].
I was using the city with the highest absolute GDP. That's a fair point that Munich has a higher GDP per capita.
> You are talking about tech but this is about Tesla. I don't get why people are still treating Tesla like a tech company. They are making cars that happen to have some driving assistance. By that metric VW, BMW, and Daimler are also tech companies, each way larger than Tesla by cars sold, people employed, and GDP impact. Tesla is as much tech as WeWork was tech.
My point about tech isn't so much the nature of the business, as the presence of a well functioning startup scene. I think it would be very very difficult to start a new capital and labor intensive company like Tesla in Germany today, and the non-presence of tech is just symptomatic of the difficulty of starting new businesses.
Compare the largest companies by revenue in the US to Germany:
Most of the German ones were founded in the first half of the 20th century, if not earlier (you have to be a little careful reading the list, a few say they were founded recently, but they were really just the mergers of old companies - there are a couple legitimately new ones though). In the US, there are tons of companies founded in the last few decades on the list. My argument is that the German economy is mostly sustaining itself on the back of its economic achievements prior to the institution of its modern labor policies. Economic dynamism has been hamstrung.
You are very much ignoring a lot of historical developments that lead to the situation that Berlin is in. Berlin used to be an industrial powerhouse, many well-known companies were founded there - Siemens for example. Borsig, Varta, Osram, ... had large factories in the city. However, after WW2, Berlin was divided and the western part hard to reach, so most companies relocated, most industries disappeared. Siemens moved headquarters to Bavaria. Despite all the self-inflicted problems that slow economic growth, the expectation that Berlin could or should be on par with other capitals is problematic.
It’s notable, but the question of why that is so and whether that’s problematic is not as clear cut as it seems to be. For example, germany has a traditional industrial base that consists of mid-size, often family-owned businesses. We even have a word for it - Mittelstand. Quite some are world-leaders in their field. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is certainly open for debate, but it’s not as simple as “no unicorn startups in germany - fail.”
GDP is weird. For instance, private healthcare pushes GDP up, but I'm not sure Germans would like to have a higher GDP and pay a bunch more for healthcare in a market like situation.
More generally, if you look at Europe there are actually far more startups. They generally have much lower valuations though, because there isn't as much capital going into VC.
And probably you should look at Sweden as it does better than the US on a per capita basis in terms of startups.
Actually Germanys economy is very differently structured than the US. A significantly larger portion the GDP is coming from relatively small companies (called Mittelstand in German). Those companies also often invest very large percentages of their revenue into R&D (typically much more than the big cooperations). For example a significant portion of worldwide advanced manufacturing is powered by relatively small German companies that nobody ever heard about,
Where did you get this from? Germany is actually the only country in the EU where GDP per capita is higher when the capital is excluded. Munich is at 80,000€, Frankfurt (Main) 95,000€, Hamburg 60,000€, Berlin 40,000€ [1].
Germany is highly federated, with large companies near or in small towns or cities that only exist because the company was founded there decades or centuries ago.
You are talking about tech but this is about Tesla. I don't get why people are still treating Tesla like a tech company. They are making cars that happen to have some driving assistance. By that metric VW, BMW, and Daimler are also tech companies, each way larger than Tesla by cars sold, people employed, and GDP impact. Tesla is as much tech as WeWork was tech.
1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_deutschen_St%C3%A4dt... (German)