The U.S. government is working at full speed to reindustrialize the country. With tax cuts, deregulation, and hard-nosed tariff policy, German companies are also being persuaded to engage in the United States. And when persuasion is not enough, U.S. investors go shopping.
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For the left and the German media mainstream, Elon Musk is the proverbial “Lord, help us.” An entrepreneur who takes a political stand. For many Germans, the free world ends right there, especially since the voices of entrepreneurs have largely disappeared from public view as soon as things become politically uncomfortable.
Despite all the disputes, Elon Musk still stands firmly behind U.S. President Donald Trump, another persona non grata in the German public sphere. Trump is pursuing perhaps the most aggressive form of reindustrialization policy we have seen since the German economic miracle after the end of the Second World War. With tariffs, deregulation of energy policy, and tax cuts, Trump is getting to work, and the numbers speak for him: Private-sector investment is rising by between 8 and 10 percent year-on-year. The U.S. economy is growing steadily at an annual real rate of 3.5 percent, roughly in line with the increase in labor productivity.
The situation in Germany is different. Here, private-sector investment, after depreciation, slipped into negative territory around the turn of the year. Labor productivity is stagnating or even eroding slightly. In Germany, the economy is now being held together only precariously by the debt hammer and the construction of a domestic war economy. Nothing economically innovative can emerge in such an environment. The consequence is that next year, once the municipal deficit and the special funds are included, the debt burden will rise by more than 5 percent, measured as a share of GDP.
In the United States, the trend is moving in the opposite direction. Despite being largely ignored by the German press, the Trump administration has at least managed to reduce the budget deficit from 6.9 percent under his predecessor Joe Biden to probably around 4.7 percent in the current year. It would not be surprising if the Americans managed to break the dynamics of debt altogether.
Elon Musk plays a significant role in this. Alongside numerous major projects such as the space company SpaceX and the automaker Tesla, his latest project, the chipmaker Terafab, could make economic history in the United States.
Terafab was announced in March 2026 and is to be built in Texas as a joint project between Tesla, SpaceX, and chipmaker Intel. The facility is ultimately planned to cover up to 9.3 million square meters and thus become the largest building in the world. Depending on the stage of development, investment is estimated at between $16.8 billion and $119 billion. In the long term, Terafab is intended to provide more than one terawatt of annual AI computing capacity.
The facility is to manufacture customized AI logic chips and memory chips, primarily for Tesla’s Optimus robots, autonomous vehicles, and Cybercabs, as well as SpaceX’s planned space-based data centers. In the long term, production of up to 100 to 200 billion of these AI and memory chips per year is envisioned. Musk is therefore not simply trying to build another chip factory, but to bring the entire value chain — from manufacturing and memory to packaging and testing — under one roof. Step by step, the Americans are making themselves less dependent on chip production by Taiwanese giant TSMC and are slowly but surely pushing themselves back into pole position in the competition with China.
Good economic policy removes infrastructure bottlenecks while otherwise largely staying out of economic affairs. Germany’s energy policy should be proof enough of the damage that ideologically driven delusion and persistent intervention can cause.
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German industry is playing an increasingly important role in the reindustrialization of the United States. In 2025 alone, U.S. investors acquired stakes in or control of 76 German industrial and manufacturing companies worth around $29.5 billion — double the figure recorded in 2022. By August 19, 2026, another $23.9 billion had already been added. Prominent cases include Viessmann and a stake in Aixtron, as well as the acquisition of fan manufacturer EBM-Papst by Madison Air for $5.4 billion and further transactions in mechanical engineering, automotive suppliers, energy, and manufacturing.
Across industrial sectors, know-how and technologies protected by German patents are therefore flowing into the United States — strengthening its industrial base and the competitiveness of its economy. German policymakers apparently do not seem concerned. Quite the contrary: The German chancellor once again underlined his priorities at the beginning of the week — the fight against CO2 emissions; energy policy, he said, should not change.
Germany’s deindustrialization therefore appears increasingly unstoppable. It is becoming increasingly irreversible.
Which brings us back to Elon Musk. Good entrepreneurs are what the country needs to turn the ship around. Visionaries who open up markets and thereby create prosperity. True elites are needed. But being part of the elite also means standing by one’s country and by values such as performance, individual and social responsibility, and the fight for civil liberties — values that are considered outdated nonsense and taboo in the political mainstream.
Where are Germany’s Elon Musks hiding? Where have the courageous representatives of the Mittelstand retreated to? Why are so few willing to step into the public arena and criticize the growing state economy, dangerous censorship, and the ideological rampage of the obsessive world-improvers that has paralyzed the country?
In Germany, 188,000 businesses were abandoned last year. Just 24,000 of them disappeared as a result of insolvency.
Many German entrepreneurs are throwing in the towel these days. They sell up and take their profit — whether to Americans, Chinese, or competitors in other successful locations no longer matters. What unites them all, what everyone in the country can feel, is this: Entrepreneurs, young and ambitious academics, independent minds, and friends of freedom are no longer welcome in Germany in 2026.
German mainstream media, the political class, and the left-green establishment that sustains it cultivate an aggressive, one-dimensional socialism that turns against anyone who dares to disturb the subsidized paradise of perpetual recipients with criticism.
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Image: Public Domain Pictures