Victor Davis Hanson: The American Tech Boom No One Is Talking About

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:37)
Of the ten top AI platforms that people use every day, eight of them are all American.
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 were bogged down around. 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 powers are 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. China that has four times our population only has 380 companies.
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 in to space 400 satellites. That's quite an achievement. SpaceX alone, that is not other competitors, just SpaceX alone launched 3,500, almost 9 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 100 less. They only launched 93, Russia 17, Europe 8, India 5 That is an incredible achievement, what we have done. We have just sort of made a monopoly of sending rockets into space and satellites into the lower atmosphere of space. One thing that everybody is talking about is artificial intelligence. And so, there is a variety of ways to gauge the influence of a particular AI company. But rather than just market capitalization, there is 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 Chat GPT in terms of traffic. Number two was Google Gemini. Number three was Claude Anthropic. Number four was Microsoft Co-Pilot. Number five was Perplexity AI. And number six was Grok. Number seven was Mid Journey. Stop, they're all Americans.
And then we get the first number eight was Dubio. That is Chinese. And Mistral, that I think is French. And the final 10th 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 ten, Adobe. And what am I getting at? We have ten 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 percent of them. Finally, people are talking about genetic engineering.