Got it, so you're using arbitrary metrics of economic success and a number of protectionist policies and other regulations to justify your comparison of the European Union to a state capitalist, planned economy with secret police, authoritarian and dictatorial rule, extremely rigid top-down hierarchical governance and tight travel restrictions that is widely known for its massive domestic surveillance apparatus, extreme use of forced labor camps, forced resettlements, violent military suppression of leftist opposition, waves of purges of political sects, and the literal genocide in Ukraine?

That seems like a completely reasonable analogy one would use with no ulterior motives. Assuming, of course, one were completely ignorant of most world history events of the 20th century.

---

But you're literally begging the question so let's look at your list. Here's the top 10 biggest companies in the US:

1. Apple
2. Nvidia
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Google
6. Meta
7. Tesla
8. UnitedHealth
9. Oracle
10. Costco

Right off the bat the odd one out is UnitedHealth. They're a megacorp resulting from the fusion of multiple private health insurance companies - with some of the mergers clearly being considered so concerning for market competition that there were attempts to prevent them, which - as is common in the US - of course failed. This is a company leeching billions of American citizens to act as a middleman for healthcare while Americans still have to pay most of their medical expenses out of pocket. Not to mention the blatant corruption between health insurance companies and medical service providers resulting in completely arbitrary costs with fictional discounts. An inefficiency that has made American healthcare orders of magnitude more expensive than in other developed nations while still providing worse health outcomes for the average citizen and fueling the uniquely American opioid epidemic thanks to decades of prioritizing prescription medications over actually useful diagnostic procedures and treatments.

Let's single out NVidia because its stock price ballooned over the past three years and as the dip following the Deepseek announcement demonstrated has more to do with the general AGI hype train than actual value produced - unless you believe the announcement literally destroyed "$600bn in value" rather than just correcting the clearly absurd valuation of the company.

Amazon has almost single-handedly wiped out most of the retail industry in the US and elsewhere. They have massive control over the cloud infrastructure market. Their in-house brands have a documented history of cloning successful products sold on Amazon and then outcompeting them the same way Amazon initially outcompeted retail with unsustainable price dumping, only to hike up prices once the competition is out of business. This has allowed Jeff Bezos to become one of the richest people on Earth and Amazon to use its market dominance as leverage against individual US states to get sweetheart deals waiving regulations and labor protection laws and securing tax exemptions.

Microsoft and Oracle are deeply entrenched in the enterprise market, especially public service and bureaucracy. Microsoft literally has a public history of an anti-competitive strategy called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" that was used to harm industry standards and interoperability in order to tighten vendor lock-in. Oracle's problems are less blatant but it also pretty much grew to its size through deliberate vendor lock-in, shady licensing, and malicious and at times illegitimate lawsuits, often using lawfare against open source projects especially. Bill Gates is now using his wealth to open new markets to US pharmaceutical companies under the guise of humanitarianism. Larry Ellison seems to keep more out of the public light while using his billions to influence political campaigns.

Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta literally made their billions through the exploitation of the personal information of their users while deliberately misleading them about what data was collected and how it is used. They then used their de-facto monopoly positions in search and social media respectively to sell ads and analytics - and are well-documented to have actively misled customers by fudging their metrics (e.g. Facebook pushed video content in an effort to move news sites to publishing on their platform directly although the success metrics of the videos were deliberately engineered to grossly exaggerate their reach and engagement, harming those sites to the point some went out of business). Meta's prioritization of "engagement" at any cost and insufficient content moderation have directly contributed to multiple genocides and the platform has been used to organize child sexual abuse and live stream spree killings. Google meanwhile dominates the search and browser markets (even most alternative browsers are built on Chromium).

Apple is probably the least actively damaging company of the bunch but its success also is based entirely on the infamous "walled garden" approach of vendor lock-in ranging from software to hardware, in the past literally preventing its software from being used on third party hardware and closely controlling the ability of other manufacturers to interface with its hardware. It has since begun opening up to third parties and using interoperable industry standards - thanks to legal pressure from the EU for selling its products within the EU. It's also pretty much the perfect example for "vertical integration" taken to the extreme.

Tesla's initial value was mostly driven by being in the right spot at the right time (especially thanks to Elon Musk's antics resulting in popular media comparing him to Tony Stark because the Iron Man movies were normalizing comic book characters in wider pop culture and techno-optimism and space-futurism were at their zenith), as well as using the first-mover advantage to build out proprietary charging infrastructure. But its biggest competitive advantage were government subisides in the form of carbon emission credits, which it sold for profit to other manufacturers, raking in literally billions of dollars ($9 billion between 2009 and 2024 alone) at zero cost to Tesla itself. Tesla's present valuation however is largely the consequence of its stock price massively ballooning in 2020 - the most likely reasons for which are 1) its ability to remain profitable with literally zero production due to the sale of said credits and 2) its "vertical integration" (read: use of proprietary parts rather than relying on suppliers), i.e. again vendor lock-in.

The reason Tesla's stock price remains mostly stable (the recent drop thanks to its association with Elon Musk's current antics notwithstanding) - despite the company's constant failings with the Cybertruck, quality issues and the yearly promises of FSD being imminent - seems to be mostly tied to its inclusion in various funds and derivatives because of its meteoric rise. Either way this success has allowed Elon Musk to literally buy his way into one of the arguably most influential positions of power via the Trump government, directly controlling a legion of unelected interns dismantling US government services from within.

SpaceX (not publicly traded, so not in your list) meanwhile has a number of lucrative government contracts (mostly with US agencies but also internationally), especially because of its increasingly dominant position in satellite broadband which as demonstrated in Ukraine does not only provide them (and Elon Musk) with an economic advantage but also the ability to exert direct political influence over geopolitical events.

The massively influential prison industrial complex (maintaining the US's leader in number of incarcerated citizens both relative to its population and in absolute numbers) and military industrial complex (which are uniquely influential in the US federal government, rivaled only by Elon Musk himself now) of course also aren't something I'd expect anyone to brag about.

I can't really say anything bad about Costco though. Their failings mostly seem to be the result of the poor state of consumer protection, health and safety, and animal cruelty laws in the US and they genuinely seem to seek to improve those issues when they become public. Sinegal, Brotman and James all seem to be genuinely decent people and the company policy has fairly explicitly been shaped by the idea of putting customers and employees over shareholders - quite unlike the general consensus in the US following Milton Friedman.

In the EU, most of these companies couldn't have existed because they'd have run afoul of antitrust legislation, consumer protection laws, labor laws, health and safety laws, etc - either at the EU level or at a member state level (which would likely have fueled EU legislation to standardize the laws across member states). The DMA and DSA were literally created because of the anti-competitive behavior of some of these companies and their outsized influence across multiple markets. The GDPR was literally created because of the massive violations of privacy and the demonstrable harm caused by them.

The EU is not without its flaws. As I said, it's literally a Free Trade Agreement at its heart and the poor cooperation during COVID hopefully dispelled its loftier claims. But if you think the existence of practical monopolies in the US is a demonstration of the US's superior "free market", your "freedom" looks a lot more like feudalism with extra steps.