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

Peter Thiel (Credit: Gerald Matzka/Getty Images)

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.