Carsten Maschmeyer in an interview: "I think Elon Musk is completely crazy"

Will the new federal government give the economy a boost? Carsten Maschmeyer is confident that this can be achieved. "We have to get out of the regulatory madness," he says in an interview with ntv.de and explains what this has to do with coffee prices. However, the startup investor does not see Elon Musk as a role model for reducing bureaucracy.

ntv.de: Germany is getting a new federal government - most likely with CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the SPD, without the Greens and certainly not with the FDP. Given your criticism of the traffic light coalition, you must be quite happy.

Carsten Maschmeyer: I am very happy that we will probably get a two-party coalition. The three-party coalition of the traffic light parties did not work at all. It would have been very difficult to form a three-party coalition of the CDU/CSU, SPD and the Greens, which is what it looked like at times on election night. I think that the SPD will approach the compromises that now have to be found pragmatically. It is important that the new federal government concentrates on economic issues. We finally need growth again.

Germany's economy has been stagnating since 2018 - even during a coalition between the CDU/CSU and SPD led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. What makes you so optimistic that things will get better now?

Yes, we missed numerous growth opportunities during Merkel's time in government. But it was Economics Minister Robert Habeck who finally put the nail in the coffin of Deutsche Wirtschafts AG. Germany used to be Europe's growth engine, but now we have two years of recession behind us. I see more pragmatism in the SPD, but ideology in the Greens. The promised green economic turnaround has not happened.

And with a black-red alliance, will things really get better?

Friedrich Merz is a man with a lot of experience in business, where he was successful. Now he has to be successful in politics. I hope he succeeds. If not, we will probably have an AfD-led government after the next federal election.

How can Germany end its weak growth?

Corporate taxes must be reduced, paralyzing bureaucracy must be reduced. And we must invest more in digitalization. Digitally, we are still in the Stone Age. Electricity prices for consumers and companies must fall. Incidentally, they are also so high because Merkel initiated the nuclear phase-out after the Fukushima disaster and Habeck had the last three nuclear reactors shut down. In addition, entrepreneurs are asking themselves: Where can my company pay less taxes and deal with less bureaucracy? In order to make our companies internationally competitive, we must reduce corporate taxes from almost 30 percent to 25 percent. This applies not only to large companies, but also to master craftsmen who will otherwise have to relocate their business on the Dutch border to a neighboring country.

How much do you actually still enjoy investing in Germany?

With pleasure. We have great researchers, scientists, programmers. We have hard-working, courageous, revolutionary-thinking founders. But they are all drowning in bureaucracy. To put it bluntly: The USA invented the innovation and we invented the regulation for it. Friedrich Merz has said that he would like to let the founders get started in a largely bureaucracy-free, regulation-free environment for the first one or two years. I think that's a good idea.

Entrepreneurs regularly complain about the bureaucracy in Germany…

And they're right! Let me illustrate the over-regulation with an example: If you buy ground coffee, you pay 7 percent VAT. But if you buy a coffee to go with a little milk, it's 19 percent. If you decide to have a latte macchiato to go with 75 percent milk, you pay 7 percent. If you have a latte with 50 percent milk, you pay 19 percent. But if you order the latte macchiato to go but then prefer to drink it in the shop, the owner has evaded taxes. That's completely crazy and shows the abundance of rules and over-regulation that currently exists in Germany.

And it's so much better in the USA?

The USA is much braver than we are. I am used to sitting in self-driving cars in California. We could do that in Germany too - but regulations prevent it. My first trip in one of these cars was a blast! But I wasn't relaxed the first time. Now I've got used to it and can work through documents or make phone calls during the journey. But with innovations like autonomous driving, I'm not interested in the experience, but in productivity. For example: In Germany, a nurse could use the trip in a self-driving car effectively between two visits to patients and write reports or discuss things with colleagues, or even have a short rest between two stressful appointments. To become better and more efficient, we need to get away from the regulatory madness.

In the USA, Elon Musk wants to push for deregulation and is swinging a chainsaw to do so. What do you think about that?

I think Elon Musk is - to put it bluntly - completely crazy in many areas. He is a great visionary, but also presumptuous and extreme. He is the biggest oligarch in the world. He doesn't just want to be the richest, he is striving for a kind of world domination. He has formed a disastrous alliance with Donald Trump. But I am confident that the USA will survive this too.

Jan Gänger spoke with Carsten Maschmeyer