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by Growling_owl 1833 days ago
How come when a company is not American the intro is always:

[Country's]+[company name]

Whereas if the company is American it's always:

[founder's name]+[company name]

I don't know if it has to do with media or with the fact that foreign founders might want to be more in the dark compared to American ones.

In Europe wealth is historically frowned upon so people might be trying to get their millions or billions in the dark and only speak and be relevant among decision makers circles.

If that's the case then those people will dominate American corporate world in the future because it's appearent that being famous only means trouble.

Besides it makes tremendous sense. Wealth gives you a megaphone but such megaphone is useless if people are able to look your speech rehersals, while you sweat,strutter and stop mid sentence.

It's my opinion that the journey of an entrepreneur who wants to get into politcs should be:

Money > Sports franchise > social relevance ..or

Money > Own Rock band > social relevance

Money > your own movie > social relevance

It's really cringy when these SaaS guys or EVs guys try to appeal to the masses. You end up being hated by those who hate the rich and ignored by everybody else

3 comments

I’m not sure about the founder part (or that it really is the trend you suggest), but I think it’s pretty normal given HN is an American media property with a heavy American user base that anything foreign gets called out with that country. The same thing happens in other countries unless the subject is well familiar. For example, searching HN’s history for Bosche doesn’t label the company itself as belonging to Germany. ARM similar isn’t identified by country either. This is a new company, and typically when manufacturing is involved, the site of manufacturing is labeled (even if in the US by state).
Good point. However, in this case the headline was chosen by Reuters.
If the founder/Investors of Northvolt had to choose, I'm pretty sure they would prefer their names in the title. Guess their names are just not famous enough, so better attribute to it to Sweden. More people probably knows who Elon Musk is than what Sweden is anyways :)

//A Swede

I moved from California to Switzerland for a couple of years, and more than one person asked if I was going to learn Swedish. It’s kind of sad really.
> I'm from Switzerland

> Oh amazing, Sweden is beautiful

pikachu face

> More people probably knows who Elon Musk is than what Sweden is anyways

Musk is like a weird combination of Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump.

He tweets like Trump, but when he gets on stage he stutters and speak as badly as Michael Bloomberg.

Regardless of what one thinks of Trump people knew him for more than being just a rich guy, he was the CEO of the Apprentice and Yankees #1 fan for a long time.

He also speaks with the utmost confidence, this is a great social skill and you can use it at will if you don't need the academics and the high IQ people on your side...in politics it's one person, one vote

US-bias is lame, but I can think of a couple counter-examples where it doesn't usually need to be mentioned: e.g. Shopify and Spotify. Could it be that once a company is successful then it doesn't come up as much?