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Comment by sien | Hacker News Reader

To paraphrase Monty Python:

Look, other than building Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, the Iphone, Tesla, SpaceX, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, AirBnB, Epic Games, Steam, Instacart and others what have Americans built lately?

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Almost all of these are products of the wealthy, for the wealthy. America used to stand for quality and ingenuity - american tools, cars, or even just methods of work and production were world class and many countries strived to copy them, import them, buy them. Nowadays America has turned into a playground for the rich, with American products generally considered sub-par, with systems and methods being studied as how to "not" do things, and generally settling into a position of a global player who only has to be respected because it's wealthy, not because it is actually a leader in anything other than wealth extraction.

To put it in a different way - America is falling down in almost every metric that measures quality of life globally. But yeah, they built Facebook and Apple, and Apple is one of it not the wealthiest companies in the world, so that counts for something, yeah?

You make more money selling to rich people. And, yeah, having the wealthiest companies in the world counts for a lot.

For whom?

This is not true, many of those companies have cheap mass-market products.

The billionaires have gotten younger and younger, too.

making the whole eat the rich idea much more enticing.

Stripe was built by Irish founders.

Who chose to move to the US when it was time build something great (as is true for several founders of great 'American' companies). America's (historic) greatness didn't come from Americans necessarily being the best and the brightest, but from convincing the best and the brightest from all over the world that America was the country where they wanted to build their dream.

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