I'm not so sure there even is so much less risk-taking in Europe than in US.
There are many structural reasons why Europe doesn't produce gigagrowth oligopolies like the US. EU has a highly fractured internal market that is more difficult to dominate, EU is not bathing in reserve currency windfalls to be thrown all around and EU doesn't have as ruthless foreign/trading policies.
Also there's a difference how "risk taking" is portrayed in the public discourse. In US success of companies are seen more as result of risk-taking of individuals, whereas in Europe success its seen more as resulting from collective effort, and founders/CEOs of successful companies are not lauded as heros, or are even usually especially famous.
Risk-rewards calculus is simply worlds' apart for exploratory/long term R&D versus tech deployment, which is sadly what elon/faang/openAI/nVIDIA are only about.
(I imagine Musk
thinks he's bringing back a closed, for profit Bell System, though!)
I dunno, maybe Arc Institute/research hospitals poised to collect all the bionerds falling out of universities, these are the oligopolies that have any chance of morphing into semi-open Bell Labs-like setups.
Are there nothing of comparable scale in Europe?!? (Not many, I imagine, due to mostly what you already pointed out)
There are many structural reasons why Europe doesn't produce gigagrowth oligopolies like the US. EU has a highly fractured internal market that is more difficult to dominate, EU is not bathing in reserve currency windfalls to be thrown all around and EU doesn't have as ruthless foreign/trading policies.
Also there's a difference how "risk taking" is portrayed in the public discourse. In US success of companies are seen more as result of risk-taking of individuals, whereas in Europe success its seen more as resulting from collective effort, and founders/CEOs of successful companies are not lauded as heros, or are even usually especially famous.