To my American friends from a Frenchman, from a European. Before you vote in the midterms, let me give you some perspective, because we've already lived the movie you're being sold. The Soviet Union promised equality and delivered gulags, famine, bread lines, and a state that lied about everything. Solzhenitsyn spent his life documenting it: tens of millions dead, and an entire people taught that truth was whatever the Party said it was. Nobody votes for that on day one. You vote for “a little more state, a little more redistribution, a little more control over what you can say”: it's a slope, not a cliff.

France is what the middle of that slope looks like:

• one of the heaviest tax burdens in the developed world
• public spending around 57% of GDP
• > THREE TRILLION EUROS IN DEBT
• a state that tries to control everything with a suffocating bureaucracy
• schools set on fire during riots
• insecurity so normal that people stop reporting it
• engineers, founders and doctors leaving every year for London, Dubai, Lisbon, or your countr
• And worst of all, a whole generation that no longer believes tomorrow can be better than today. That's what kills a country: the death of hope, not one bad law.

I build my company between Paris and San Francisco. I know exactly where ambition is welcomed and where it's punished. You have something we don't: Elon Musk on your side. Please listen to him. A man who voted Democrat most of his life didn't switch sides on a whim. He saw something coming. We in Europe are already living it. Don't make the same mistake that we did.