The latest issue of Fortune magazine profiles Margrethe Vestager, “Europe’s new competition commissioner.”
It’s early evening and Margrethe Vestager is sitting in her Brussels office sipping coffee, talking about her now famous antitrust campaigns against some of the world’s largest businesses. “If you want to eat an elephant, you need a strategy,” she says from her elegant perch surrounded by modern Danish paintings. “If you try to do it in one bite, you will choke on it.”
The tasks Vestager has set for herself as Europe’s new competition commissioner are nothing if not elephantine. In just six months on the job, the antitrust chief has fired salvos at some of the world’s most powerful corporations in a series of cases that could cost the companies billions. In April she charged Google for allegedly elbowing out competitors of its shopping site, and Russia’s Gazprom for locking in high prices in EU markets. Both companies are preparing rebuttals. Now Vestager is weighing challenges to GE’s $14 billion deal to buy France’s Alstom, as well as telecom acquisitions in both her native Denmark and Britain.
One can’t help but think about Friedrich Hayek’s warnings regarding the “fatal conceit.”
