Hermann Hauser: ‘It’s in Nvidia’s Interests to Destroy Arm’

Not sure how much money they made selling their stake on the company, but if Wikipedia's valuation for Acorn and ARM are correct, can't be more than a couple of million dollars.

Those shares would be worth many billions of dollars today.

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Why do you think the brits have anything to do with anything?

If ARM ends up being bought by NVIDIA, that would actually be this Hermann Hauser's guy fault for selling ARM for pocket change. Complaining that their buyer's buyer's buyer now wants to make money with those shares by selling them to the highest bidder is sad. If ARM was so important to him, then maybe they shouldn't have sold their stake on it in the first place... Making a show about it now is like complaining that your ex that you dumped now has a new boyfriend.

There is also a weird preoccupation with the London startup scene; politicians decided they were going to nurture it and help fund things there. Which is fine, but they ignored the Cambridge area which is where a lot of the actual innovative tech in the UK gets developed, in favour of (effectively) a bunch of cool-sounding app vendors.

Haha, me laughing then crying in underpaid German conservatism that dwarfs the British one.

You guys don't know how good you have it. Brexit aside, London is still Europe's biggest tech capital by a long shot and devs there can make way more than anywhere in Europe bar Switzerland.

In my view the biggest reason for the difference in success between UK/EU tech companies and US ones is simply the sheer size of the US market. Particularly for the current set of big-tech incumbents which are largely consumer focussed.

The creation EU Single Market (in which ironically the UK played a large part) was an attempt to compete, but while larger and having greater regulatory uniformity in many areas than the US, different EU countries speak different languages and have a less integrated culture than the US. This makes it harder to grow companies to the size they might in the US.

We let Germany buy one of the most important companies on the planet in Monsanto. I consider Monsanto to be a national security level company, we should have never let it go. Seed & AG tech is critical for the coming century and Monsanto is one of the very few global giants.

For a long time we've been allowing European pharma giants to catch up in biotech by acquiring several of our important biotech companies, as with Genentech, Genzyme, Baxalta, MedImmune, Bioverativ and so on. We let Germany's Merck buy up Sigma-Aldrich. We let our medtech juggernaut, Medtronic, rebase to Ireland, no doubt taking important IP and jobs with it over time.

When I watch important US companies like Genzyme get consumed by a European company, I fully understand how the Europeans feel about ARM etc.

USA has created monstrous monopolies that are very heavily subsidized by the government. Amazon, Apple, etc. do not pay taxes and yet get big sums of money to settle in cities.

That is the money that USA is using to buy European companies. China blocked the USA from buying their tech, and the result is a healthy ever growing tech scene.

I have worked for a couple of European tech companies purchased by USA corporations. First "nothing will change" is the message, two years later the reduction in quality is clear and all the tech is siphoned to the USA side of the business. It makes sense, it is good for the USA.

Europe should follow the Chinese example and ban most of USA tech. No more Facebook radicalizing our citizens, no more Amazon taking over all business without control, ... When TikTok started to grow, the USA banned it. That is the game. Europe should follow, ban Facebook, Twitter, ... let local talent grow. There is much wasted talent in Europe overwhelmed by the current position of USA companies.

"Just don't sell" does not work when your adversary puts all the weight of the state to protect and subsidize their tech industry.

Having lived on both sides of the Atlantic, I would say it felt much easier to start a business in the UK: Healthcare is covered, believe it or not there is less bureaucracy, there's great digital banking options that the US is only just getting its head around, etc. In Europe I always felt I had a safety net to fall back on if my business failed – not so in the US.

My own hypothesis is that the European stock exchanges aren't a particularly attractive place for an IPO. London's AIM, isn't quite the NASDAQ. The US tech stocks are now worth more than the entire European stock market according to Bank of America Global Research.

And so I think it's always in the back of a Founder's mind – not to mention their investors – that they'll have better liquidity if they're packaged as a US inc. to start with – and if not just sell to one.

Hopefully with Sequoia opening an office in London though, this will begin to change.

It even goes as far to basically blame the poor for their own poverty. It makes zero consideration for the higher health care costs or general cost of living differences between America and Europe (for example: The average European does not need to own a car, does not need expensive heating or extreme cooling, and their healthcare costs are far cheaper) The most notable bit is healthcare, as the hilarious math says 'well the CHIP benefits save them X thousands of $ vs out of pocket costs!' (Because healthcare costs WAY more in the US) but the purchasing power index is not biased in that category so it accounts the same.

Might I add that the author's main book is about proving the bible is true and that the earth is 7000 years old from a 'I think it is true so here are my mental gymnastics ' perspective.

I think that's too much of a blanket statement. France (the second or third largest economy in Europe depending on the year) is a potent counter argument to that premise.

Bernard Arnault, $89 billion. Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, $66 billion. Francois Pinault, $42 billion. Alain Wertheimer, $32 billion. Gerard Wertheimer, $32 billion.

Those are immense dynastic fortunes and there's no indication those people plan to give it all away in the style of Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg, Scott, Carnegie, Rockefeller.

The US economy is about eight times larger than the French economy. If you expect that an economy eight times larger might produce something in the ballpark of fortunes eight times larger (one can apply a discount and it'll still be extreme), that wealth scale & concentration is mind-boggling large even by Bezos standards. Arnault's wealth might be like someone in the US being worth $712 billion in terms of how it towers over the economy and other wealth in the nation.

Germany has 34 of the top 500 fortunes in the world. 6.8% of the 500 richest, and Germany is slightly over 1% of the world's population, and about 4% of the global economy. Clearly they like their giant fortunes as much as the next affluent nation. And the Germans are notorious for their dynastic wealth as well, they have no problem passing down immense fortunes to the next generations.

(I'd do national share of global wealth for Germany, however that's a super messy batch of numbers, especially settling on even semi-accurate estimates for global wealth; it's still fairly interesting to see how their economy represents itself as part of the global share, and then how many top 500 fortunes that has produced.)

Sweden, with just ten million people, has 12 of the top 500 fortunes.

Russia - now infamous for their billionaire oligarchs - has 24 of the top 500 fortunes, while simultaneously having tens of millions of the poorest people in Europe.

Having some advantage may be worth the purchase.

Example: Nvidia would prefer certain specifications on an internal bus they'd use, but nobody else uses as a standard.

Thats if they keep ARM alive and mostly like it is for now at least.

Point is, Nvidia can't be trusted not to use that anti-competitively, given their existing reputation and amount of leverage they would get on even more things. So if competition laws would have worked as intended, Nvidia wouldn't have been allowed to buy ARM.