🛎️ Draghi’s Closed Room

Mario Draghi and Patrick Collison have started a club. Fifty-five members, a first session from 20 to 23 September, closed doors, no minutes. The Rhine Group holds no capital and decides nothing. Its product is pressure: getting European governments to act at last on the report Draghi wrote two years ago.

The Commission had asked him for it. Four hundred pages delivered in September 2024, a blunt diagnosis, Europe is falling behind on technology, and 567 measures to stop it. Brussels took up part of it, member states much less. The Paris think tank Institut Montaigne counted 30% implemented by late May. Governments read the thing and declined most of it, which is a verdict as much as an execution failure, and a club convened to overturn that verdict starts from an odd premise.

A private club owes nobody a seat, and the argument holds. Collison has never sat on anything either. He founded Stripe with his brother, the payments infrastructure behind a large slice of online commerce, and funds basic research through the Arc Institute on the side. A former central banker and an operator who has been building for fifteen years: on paper the pairing is right.

The roster runs twelve French members, twelve German, seven Italian, six British, five Spanish. No Poles. One member comes from a country that joined the Union after 2004, the former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who left office ten years ago. The complaint is not new. In 2024 the Latvian, Polish and Czech ministers attacked the report for ignoring their economies, and a single company from the whole region had been consulted, Bolt 🇪🇪.

Polish GDP per head has risen 3.5 times since 1990. ElevenLabs 🇵🇱 was valued at €9.4bn in February and was in talks at €19bn this summer. Kraków and Poznań run two of the EuroHPC AI factories. Luis Garicano, who runs the club day to day, wrote The Two Europes himself: growth in the east, stagnation in the west. He chairs a room the east is not in.

The room did find space for Leopold Aschenbrenner, 24, whose fund wiped out €30bn in late July on margin calls, whose lenders have since been served with SEC subpoenas. Collison was one of his first backers. A closed room can pick whom it likes; this is whom it liked.

The group’s website runs on Webflow, out of San Francisco, hosted on Amazon Web Services in Northern Virginia. It says so in the legal notice, under the address of the Geneva trust company that serves as its registered office. Xavier Niel sits among the fifty-five, and his Iliad 🇫🇷 owns Scaleway 🇫🇷 and its data centres in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw. Nobody asked him. From 20 to 23 September, fifty-five people will shut themselves in a room to work out how to make Europe grow. The ones who have been growing it for twenty years were not invited.