Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
During this midterm summer and fall, don’t fall for the doom and gloom that we hear so often about America’s in decline or we’re bogged down in Iran. In actuality, due to new deregulation, emphasis on energy production, deregulation, pruning back the federal government, and winning over the confidence of our tech sectors, the United States is waging a quiet technological revolution.
And believe it or not, what people said 30 years ago that we would be a second-class power or just like all of the others is not true. We are more preeminent in key technologies than we have ever been.
Take, for instance, tech companies. One way we measure their influence and power is their market capitalization.
Of those tech companies in the United States that are worth over $1 billion, the number has grown to 850, and the aggregate value of them is $5.2 trillion. That means nationwide, people are buying their products and investing in them.
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China, that has four times our population, only has 380 companies, and it has a market capitalization of only about 20%, $1.3 trillion.
Think of that. All of a sudden, our tech companies are just outpacing the Chinese and the Europeans in a way nobody had imagined. If you look at the market capitalization alone of SpaceX, $1.8 trillion. It is larger than the market capitalization of all the Chinese tech companies combined, as well as the European companies.
If you want to talk about satellites and space exploration, last year China put into space 400 satellites. That’s quite an achievement. SpaceX alone, that is not other competitors, just SpaceX alone launched 3,500, almost nine times the amount of the entire Chinese space consortium. If we look at rocket launches, the United States last year launched, depending how we calibrate the size of the rocket, about 190 launches.
That was more than all the space rocket launches combined in the rest of the world. For example, China only launched 93. Russia, 17. Europe, eight. India, five.
That is an incredible achievement what we have done. We’ve just sort of made a monopoly of sending rockets into space and satellites into the lower atmosphere of space.
One thing that everybody’s talking about is artificial intelligence. And so there’s a variety of ways to gauge the influence of a particular AI company. But rather than just market capitalization, there’s a lot of rankings by global traffic. What are people in South America, what are people in Africa, what are people in Asia doing when they want an AI consultation?
Which platform do they go to? And it turns out that number one was ChatGPT in terms of traffic. Number two was Google Gemini. Number three was Claude Anthropic. Number four was Microsoft Copilot. Number five was Perplexity AI, and number six was Grok. Number seven was Midjourney. Stop. They’re all Americans. And then we get the first number, eight was Doubao, that is Chinese, and Mistral, that I think is French.
And the final tenth is Notion AI. What I’m getting at is, of the 10 top AI platforms that people use every day, eight of them, the top seven are all American.
Finally, another way of gauging American competitiveness, there’s a couple more, is software companies, and we can do that by market capitalization because they’re so different.
The number one company in the world with $4.4 trillion in market capitalization is Apple. The number two is Alphabet-Google with $4.17 trillion. Number three, Microsoft, 3.5. Number four, Meta, $1.4 trillion. Number five, Oracle, $422 billion. Number six, Palantir, $279 billion. Number seven, Palo Alto Networks, $118 billion.
And we come to number eight, the first foreign company with $220 billion. Just a fraction of what the top three companies’ market capitalization is in SAP SE. Number nine, Salesforce. Number 10, Adobe. And what am I getting at? We have 10 companies and eight or nine of them are American, depending on how we gauge some of the foreign capital markets.
In other words, for the most exciting and most influential and most determinative technology of the future, the United States has captured, in terms of influence and value, about 85 to 90% of them.
Finally, people are talking about genetic engineering. This has become a very relevant topic to myself because after a health issue, I’ve discovered that with genetic engineering, they can take a tumor out of your body, biopsy it, chart your genetic mutations, give you blood tests every 90 days, and find one cell in your blood system that may have the same cancer tumor’s mutation, even though it will not show up on a scan for four or five months.
But they will give you warning that you may have a recurrence of a malignancy. So how is the United States there? Number one, Natera. Number two, Illumina. Number three, Crystal. Number four, Crystal Ionis Pharmaceutical. Number five, Genonomics. I could go on. There’s two that are not American and out of the top 10.
So in genetic engineering, the same thing is true, 80% to 85%, 75%, 80%, 85% of the companies that are leading the field and what people wish to invest in are American. Add it all up.
As we look toward, as we’re finished the first quarter of the 21st century, if we had looked back at what people were saying in 2000, this was supposed to be a period of decline.
The United States GDP has leaped forward at $31 trillion, 10 trillion more than the Chinese and more than the Europeans as well by 10 trillion. But in all the key emerging technologies that are gonna determine our collective safety, security, and prosperity, that is satellites, space exploration, software engineering, genetic engineering, you name it, artificial intelligence, the United States is not just leading, but it has a greater grasp, control, monopoly of these emerging technologies than the Chinese, the Europeans, and the entire world put together.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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