The Nobel Prize was awarded to Saul Perlmutter at UC Berkeley (2011), one of the discoverers in 1998 that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka at UC San Francisco (2012), who in 2006 at Kyoto University had discovered that cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent, and to Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley (2020), co-inventor in 2012 of the CRISPR method for gene editing. It was also awarded to Randy Schekman (UC Berkeley) in Medicine (2013), the Japanese-born Shuji Nakamura (UC Santa Barbara) in Physics (2014), Andrea Ghez (UCLA) and the German-born Reinhard Genzel (UC Berkeley) both in Physics in 2020, David Julius (UC San Francisco) in Medicine (2021), Carolyn Bertozzi (Stanford) in Chemistry (2022), to John Hopfield (for work on neural networks that he had done at CalTech) and Geoffrey Hinton (for work on neural networks that he had started at UC San Diego) in 2024, and to John Clarke (UC Berkeley) and John Martinis (UC Santa Barbara) in Physics and Omar Yaghi (UC Berkeley) in Chemistry (2025).

In 2014 John Martinis' team at UC Santa Barbara was hired by Google to build a quantum computer that in 2019 became the first quantum machine ever to achieve "quantum supremacy". In 2015 San Francisco inaugurated the new Medical Center of UC San Francisco at Mission Bay, largely funded by philanthropist Chuck Feeney.

While every few years some pundit predicted the end of Silicon Valley, technological progress kept accelerating in the 2020s. In 2020 alone the covid pandemic created a boom in "cloud computing" and e-commerce, Google's division Waymo launched its first self-driving "robo-taxis", SpaceX took two astronauts to the International Space Station, Tesla became the top car manufacturer in the world by market capitalization, OpenAI revolutionized Artificial Intelligence with its GPT3 "language model", and Google's Artificial Intelligence system AlphaFold solved a 50-year challenge in biology (predicting protein structures), a feat that was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024. In 2021 OpenAI introduced the image generator DALL-E, SpaceX became the most valuable start-up in the USA, and Tesla's and SpaceX's owner Elon Musk became the richest person in the world. In 2022 Apple became the first company to reach the $3-trillion valuation, greater than the GDP of Britain, Nvidia became the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, and OpenAI introduced the groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Netflix was rapidly becoming the dominant form of home entertainment, directly competing with Hollywood. By 2025, in the middle of the A.I. boom, Nvidia had become the first company valued $5 trillion.

The 2024 presidential election was truly fought in California: powerful and sinister Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen funded the presidential campaign of a senile and amoral politician, Donald Trump, against Kamala Harris, a California senator representing the traditional political establishment, who was in turn supported by Berkeley politician Nancy Pelosi (former speaker of the House) and by California governor Gavin Newsom. And the Silicon Valley tycoons won.

Historians debate at which point the USA started declining. Some point to the pointless (and lost) Vietnam War of the 1960s, which basically ended the military expansion of the (virtual) military empire of the USA after the successful annexation of South Korea and Japan. Some point to the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s, which revealed how the US economy was an oil-based economy inevitably doomed to decline as oil become scarcer. One could start by blaming the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when government debt tripled and income inequality skyrocketed (the gap between the rich and the poor). After the brief Bill Clinton era (when communism fell all over the world, the Cold War ended, and the USA was briefly the only superpower), the decline accelerated with George W Bush's pointless and failed wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), with the Great Financial Recession of 2008, and with the 2020 covid pandemic disaster under Donald Trump.

It is a fact, however, that California experienced one boom after the other precisely during the decline of the USA. By 2018 California (with a population of 40 million) had become the fifth largest economy in the world, after China (1.4 billion people), Japan (124 million) and Germany (84 million); and the Bay Area (a relatively small area with a population of seven million) was home to most of the world's most successful tech companies: Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Cisco, Netflix, etc. It wasn't only Hollywood and Silicon Valley: California was still the leading state in agricultural output, producing more than 13% of the total US agricultural value, and the largest producer of nuts, cheese, tomatoes, oranges, wine, etc.

In 2024 California's GDP surpassed Japan's and California became the world's fourth largest economy behind only China, the rest of the USA and Germany. California had obliterated the competition within the USA.