Thierry Breton is, on the face of it, well qualified to regulate Europe’s tech industry. After a brief spell as French finance minister, from 2009 to 2019 he ran the computing giant Atos, one of the champions of France’s IT industry. Yet Atos is now in deep trouble. Shares have plunged more than 90 per cent in the past five years; an issue of new shares to raise fresh capital has been cancelled. Whether the company will survive without a bailout is far from clear.

It is, of course, a while since Breton left Atos for Brussels, where he works as the European Union’s internal market commissioner. A lot may well have changed since Breton’s departure. Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that Atos’s woes go further back than the last few months.

The French EU official has described himself as ‘the enforcer’

This is an era in which many tech firms are thriving. US giants, such as Facebook and Microsoft, have soared in value. Venture capital houses have poured huge sums into tech start-ups. Chinese tech companies are expanding into the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the amount of time and money we spend on our phones increases all the time.

Against that backdrop, you would think that a well-run computing company, with the right products, could at least hold its value. But Atos has struggled to do so. Breton, it seems, did not leave the business in good shape.

Whether or not Atos can survive, Breton’s job – as the man helping make the rules that will shape the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – is safe. While his old colleagues try and prevent Atos from sinking, the EU’s internal market commissioner has moved on to better things. Now, Breton is busy laying down the boundaries for Elon Musk following his acquisition of X/ Twitter.

Breton is no stranger to boasting about what his job entails. The French EU official has described himself as ‘the enforcer’ and claims that he is representing ‘the will of the state and the people’. Is it not then slightly embarrassing that the tech company Breton ran for a decade is so close to collapse? If Breton chooses to lecture Musk or other tech bosses, there is an obvious riposte: do you really know what you are talking about?

The EU may not have many world leading tech companies, but it does claim to have the smartest regulation. Indeed, by setting down the first rules on AI it argues it will create a legal base for entrepreneurs, while its restrictions on the US giants will, it says, create a more level playing field. Perhaps. And yet it is possible that EU power brokers like Breton don’t know as much as they think they do.

‘When I joined the European Commission in 2019, I embarked on a mission to organise our ‘information space’ and to invest in our technological leadership, including in AI,’ Breton proclaimed grandly as he unveiled Europe’s AI act in December. But will the firm that Breton led for all those years be around for long enough to benefit from that ‘technological leadership’?