Peter Thiel says Germany has a ‘fear of success’ problem—and it explains why entrepreneurs don’t scale like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg

For the first time in the four-year history of the Fortune 500 Europe, the U.K. overtook Germany as the country with the most companies on the list: 76 compared with 73. 

But to billionaire investor Peter Thiel, the shift is part of a broader problem facing his birth country: Germany has struggled to create—and, perhaps more importantly, scale—the next generation of global companies.

“There’s a fear of failure,” Thiel said on the MDMEETS podcast, speaking about German entrepreneurship. “People are risk-averse and things like that, and maybe that’s true, but the dimension I want to also push back on is perhaps there’s also a fear of success.”

“If you have something that works—you’re not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg,” he told fellow German billionaire and media mogul Mathias Döpfner. Instead, Thiel argued, German entrepreneurs are more likely to sell or exit their companies before they become truly global businesses.

“What’s very striking is how few great new companies have been built in Germany in the last number of........

© Fortune