Episode 17: This Is European Tech
Forty-one European tech shares, fixed on paper on 31 August. This
episode asks the only question that basket was ever built to
answer: how much of it is actually European? Not where the office
is — where the listing is, where the capital came from, and who
holds control. Nine names come through without a footnote.
In this episode:
00:00 Cold Talk & Housekeeping. The song
now has a video, and the basket has a birthday.
06:08 On the Record: Automattic. The board
vote of 9 September that pushed Matt Mullenweg out of the CEO
chair, the CFO as interim, the Slack messages, and the reversal
by the weekend. Under the gossip: what it means when a company
and an open-source project share one person. Source state 13
September 2026 — this one moved daily.
12:15 The Basket. What we put in it, how
positions were picked, and why it is a paper basket and not a
recommendation.
15:25 Nine of Forty-One. The test applied —
listing venue, capital origin, voting control — and who
survives it intact.
20:40 Four Patterns, Not One Story. The
thirty-two do not fail the same way. Four distinct patterns,
and only one of them is a problem worth losing sleep over.
24:15 The Nvidia Test. Nvidia and Hugging Face
as a live case, with merger review open in Europe and the
United States. Run against the basket: who is buyable, who is
not, and what protection actually consists of.
31:34 Hall of European Tech. September 1991, a
student in Helsinki, a newsgroup post, and the most
consequential European software project nobody incorporated.
32:48 Markus Derails. The IFA in Berlin,
formerly the Internationale Funkausstellung — what a consumer
electronics fair still tells you about a continent's
relationship with its own technology.
35:10 The Case Against Sarah. Ownership is not
the same as control, indices are not economies, and a basket
fixed on one day proves less than it looks like.
38:26 What To Take Away. What this changes for
anyone buying, building or selling European technology.
41:48 Closing Song. "Europe On The Wire" — now
with a video, full length at sarahs-tech.eu/?seite=song.
Key Takeaways:
European Is a Listing Question, Not an
Address: Most of the basket is headquartered in
Europe. Considerably less of it is owned and governed there.
Four Failure Modes, Not One: A US listing, US
growth capital, a foreign parent and a dependency on foreign
infrastructure are different problems with different fixes.
Collapsing them into one complaint is why the debate goes
nowhere.
Acquirability Is the Real Test: The question
is not who owns a company today. It is what happens the morning
an American buyer shows up with a number.
Governance Beats Ownership: A founder with the
votes still lost the chair for three days. Structure is not the
same thing as safety — which is the Automattic story and the
basket story at once.
Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): the
full basket with ISINs and the 31 August fixing at
markus.technology/the-basket · Matt Mullenweg's own site ma.tt ·
automattic.com and wordpress.org · the Nvidia–Hugging Face
announcement and the EU and US filings · kernel.org for the Linux
anniversary · ifa-berlin.com · previous episodes: Ep. 11 "The
Imaginary ETF" and Ep. 16 "The Kill Switch Is Not Where You
Think".
Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host,
AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's
transparency rules. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here
reflects an employer's position. The basket is a documentation
exercise, not investment advice, and neither host holds a
position in it. The Automattic segment reflects reporting as of
13 September 2026.
Feedback: Build your own basket. Which European
tech company would still be European after a serious offer from
California — and what exactly would stop it? Write to
feedback@experten-system.de.
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