Emmanuel Macron has a type. He loves a stage, a tailored suit, and a narrative that makes him look like the smartest guy in a room full of people who actually built things. This week, at a high-gloss Innovation Forum in Paris, he found his latest muse: India.

"India leads global innovation," Macron declared. He pointed to the usual suspects—the CEOs running Google, Microsoft, and Starbucks—as proof that the subcontinent has finally arrived. It’s a tidy story. It’s also a massive oversimplification that ignores how global capital actually flows.

Let’s be real. If you’re a tech giant looking for a headline-grabbing soundbite, you talk about India’s "unmatched potential." If you’re a politician like Macron, you talk about India because you want to sell them Airbus jets or lure a new Tata manufacturing plant to a suburb outside Lyon. It’s a dance. Everyone knows the steps.

The list of Indian-born CEOs is, by now, a tired trope of corporate LinkedIn. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Neal Mohan, Leena Nair. It’s an impressive roster. But there’s a friction here that Macron skipped over in his rush to be visionary. These executives didn't build their empires in Bengaluru or Noida. They climbed the ladders of Mountain View and Redmond. They are products of the American university system and the Silicon Valley venture capital machine.

India’s greatest export isn't software. It’s talent.

When Macron says India is leading innovation, he’s conflating the brilliance of the Indian diaspora with the reality of the Indian domestic tech scene. Sure, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a genuine marvel. It makes Western banking apps look like they’re running on steam engines. It’s fast, it’s free, and it’s handled billions of transactions while we’re still struggling with Venmo’s social feed. That’s real. That’s the "insightful" part of the story.

But look at the cost of the hype. The Indian government is currently burning through a $10 billion subsidy program just to get chipmakers to consider building a factory in Gujarat. Most of that cash is going to companies like Micron, an American firm, to set up assembly lines, not design the next generation of processors. It’s a high-stakes bribe to prove a point. We aren’t seeing a surge of home-grown hardware. We’re seeing a very expensive real estate play.

Macron’s praise is also a convenient pivot. He needs India. With the EU’s tech regulations becoming a tangled web of red tape that scares off any founder with a pulse, France is looking for friends with deep pockets and a lot of engineers. India has both. But let’s not pretend this is a peer-to-peer exchange of "innovation." It’s a scramble for relevance in a world where the US and China have already sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

The "innovation" Macron is cheering for is often just the same old corporate churn dressed up in a different flag. The Indian startups that were supposed to conquer the world—the unicorns like Byju’s or Paytm—are currently dealing with massive valuation haircuts and regulatory nightmares. Byju’s once boasted a $22 billion valuation; now it’s a cautionary tale of hubris and bad accounting. That’s the part of the "innovation" story that doesn’t make it into the keynote speeches.

The reality is messier than a podium in Paris. India is a country of brilliant individuals trapped in a system of creaky infrastructure and protectionist politics. The CEOs Macron mentioned are the ones who got out. They’re the survivors. They represent the victory of the individual over the environment, not the triumph of the environment itself.

Macron’s rhetoric feels like a man trying to convince himself that the center of the world hasn't moved. He wants to be the bridge between the old guard and the new power. But by focusing on the faces at the top of American companies, he’s missing the point. True innovation doesn't look like a guy in a suit giving a speech at a forum. It looks like the millions of developers in Hyderabad and Pune who are tired of being the world’s back office and want to build something they actually own.

Right now, the talent is there. The ambition is there. The CEOs are definitely there. But until the capital stays in Delhi instead of flowing to Delaware, Macron is just shouting into a very expensive wind.

Is a country actually leading the world in innovation if its most successful minds have to leave home to prove it?