In April 2000 the NASDAQ stock market crashed, wiping out trillions of dollars of evaluation from the "dotcom" startups of the 1990s. In reality it was just a bump on the road towards the "net economy", because in the next few years defining technologies of the future were born. Netflix, Google and Salesforce had just been founded, each one causing major disruptions in business and in ordinary lives. In 2000 Paypal, a system for online payments, was introduced by immigrants like Max Levchin (Ukraine), Peter Thiel (Germany) and Elon Musk (South Africa). In 2001 Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia, a multilingual encyclopedia that was meant to be collaboratively edited by the Internet community. In 2002 Elon Musk founded SpaceX to develop space transportation and in 2004 it acquired electric-car maker startup Tesla. 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched the social network Facebook (2004) and in 2006 Jack Dorsey launched the social network Twitter. In 2005 Google acquired the Android operating system for mobile phones and launched the navigator Google Maps. In 2005 former Paypal employees launched the video-sharing website YouTube, acquired the following year by Google. By 2005, Silicon Valley (a small region) accounted for 14% of the world’s venture capital. That was just the beginning of the dotcom renaissance. In 2007 Apple launched the iPhone and created a whole new "mobile" economy, and turned Steve Jobs into a sort of Silicon Valley saint. The following year Google introduced a rival system, Android, that was used by all other smartphones. Airbnb (2008) and Uber (2009) created yet another economy, the "sharing economy", and also marked the revival of San Francisco, rapidly becoming an appendix of Silicon Valley. And the decade ended with the crypto-currency Bitcoin, launched in January 2009 by a mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.

The contribution of the immigrants was not negligible, and in fact it was a major factor to explain how the Bay Area was outperforming the rest of the world in advanced technology. In 2000, about one third of Silicon Valley’s high-skilled workers were foreign-born, mostly from Asia; and in 2005 more than half of Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies launched between 1995 and 2005 had been founded by at least one immigrant.

Nobel laureates at the turn of the millennium and beginning of the new one included: Paul Boyer at UCLA in Chemistry (1997), Steven Chu at UC Berkeley in Physics (1997), South-African born biologist Sydney Brenner at UC San Diego in Medicine (2002), Alan Heeger (UC Santa Barbara) in Chemistry (2000), David Gross (UC Santa Barbara) in Physics (2004), George Smoot (UC Berkeley) in Physics (2006), Roger Tsien (UC San Diego) in Chemistry (2008), Elizabeth Blackburn (UC San Francisco) in Medicine (2009).

In 2003 another Hollywood actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (known for movies like "The Terminator"), became governor of California. In 2005 San Jose’s population of almost one million passed San Francisco, so that San Jose was now the third largest city of California (after Los Angeles and San Diego) and the tenth largest city in the USA.

All of this happened while the USA was going through a lot of trouble: the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in New York and Washington (2001), the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and the Great Financial Recession (2008). If you only read the news coming out of Silicon Valley, you wouldn't know any of these events. You would have known, though, that a Black man had been elected president: Barack Obama, who led the USA between 2009 and 2016. Obama won all nine counties of the Bay Area, and in particular a whopping 84% of the vote in San Francisco. His 2008 campaign had relied heavily on social media. He embraced the growing power of Silicon Valley while it was causing anxiety in Europe.

The recession ended in 2010. In 2012 Facebook's IPO (initial public offering) was the biggest high-tech IPO in history; and new social media appeared (Pinterest and Instagram in 2010, Zoom in 2011).

The decade witnessed science-fiction become reality. In 2010 Craig Venter's team in San Diego reprogrammed the DNA of a living organism, and in 2012 it became relatively easy to edit the genome of living organisms thanks to the CRISPR-cas9 technique invented at UC Berkeley and other labs. Deep Learning was the new flavor of Artificial Intelligence popularized in 2012 by a neural network ("AlexNet") built in Canada by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and their PhD advisor Geoffrey Hinton. In 2014 Google ventured into Deep Learning buying the British startup DeepMind and two years later a system designed by DeepMind, AlphaGo, beat the world's most famous Go master. In 2016 Elon Musk, Sam Altman and several young scientists (including Ilya Sutskever) established a nonprofit research center called OpenAI. In 2018 Google and OpenAI demonstrated the first "language models", capable of answering questions written in ordinary language, of summarizing texts and even of having conversations. Meanwhile, the iPhone and Google's Android had revolutionized how people communicated, shopped, worked, obtained their news and found information: since 2016, more people users around the world were accessing the Internet from mobile phones than from desktop computers.

World-famous architects celebrated California's status with futuristic buildings such as: Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles (2002), Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), Renzo Piano's Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles (2008), Cesar Pelli's Salesforce Tower in San Francisco (2013), the tallest building in San Francisco and the second-tallest building west of Chicago, Norman Foster's Apple headquarters at Apple Park, aka the "Spaceship" (2017), etc. Wilshire Grand Center (2017), the tallest building west of Chicago, was instead designed by the illustrious local architecture firm of Albert Martin.

At the same time that business was booming, Nature was not being kind to the people of California. Between 2000 and 2017 California experienced one drought after the other: the 2000-04 drought was the worst one in California's history when measured against the Palmer Drought Severity Index, and the 2011-17 drought included the lowest snowpack ever recorded in California's history (in 2015). Between 2017 and 2021 California was devastated by massive wildfires: in Santa Rosa in October 2017; in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties (southern California) in December 2017; near Mendocino in July 2018; the "Carr Fire" of July 2018 in Shasta and Trinity Counties (northern California); the "Camp Fire" of November 2018 in Butte County (northern California); the "Woolsey Fire" near Los Angeles in November 2018; several big ones in August 2020 (notably one in Wine Country, one in the Santa Cruz mountains and the "North Complex" in Plumas National Forest); in 2021 the "Dixie Fire" (again in northern California) and the Caldor Fire near Placerville; the Borel Fire that in 2024 destroyed the historic town of Havilah in Kern County; and the multiple wildfires of January of 2025 (notably the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire) that devastated Pacific Palisades and Malibu and caused the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the state.

Nature had its own way to remind Californians of who was in control of the planet while humans edited genomes and built intelligent machines.