It depends on how you define success; the EU has certainly managed to achieve a great deal of standardization and compliance, at the cost of rate of progress and business model innovation. You might think this is a worthwhile trade off, but people differ in their priorities.
The OpenAI grift, the Facebook & Google stalking advertising, the Uber “independent contractors”, and the Amazon two-for of workers pissing in bottles and squeezing your suppliers so prices rise everywhere.
SAP, NXP, ASML, Hexagon, Infineon... These are all companies guaranteed to be touching hardware or software, they you use today, and will use tomorrow.
You jest, but milk production in Europe is far more sophisticated than in the US. Innovation has occurred there [0]. There's no stagnation, despite being a heavily regulated industry. There are new products coming to market, the market is growing at a predictable and fairly decent rate.
And if you need market cap to understand these areas, both Nestle (France) and Lactalis (Switzerland), outpace the entirety of the US industry.
The average person probably thinks that their phone, or websites, show no innovation, despite the rapidly changing underlying technologies.
He is conflating progress and business model innovation with profits. That since the US allows its corporations to get repugnantly large and wealthy, enough to rival many developed nations' GDPs, the US necessarily has more progress and business model innovation. It's just American exceptionalism.
