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Only in America things like this can happen.> A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-conductors doubling every 18 months, going from exotic, mission critical hardware to commodity;
Silicon Valley did not bootstrap itself. It received untold billions of dollars from the US government during the Cold War (and lots of stuff happened during the WW2 economy, when the US was the Allies' armorer). Do you think it a coïncidence that most spy satellites are launched from Vandenberg? Or that Skunk Works, located in California, developed so many secret aircraft?
Do a search for "The secret history of Silicon Valley":
* https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
> SpaceX is doing the same thing with flight hardware.
Notwithstanding the millions that NASA gave them in their early stages.
* https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/COTS_selection.html
The list of spinoff technologies just from NASA is impressive:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
The fact that the US was, post-WW2, the largest economy in the world, and the main developed nation that didn't see mass destruction, certainly didn't hurt.
The fact that the US government throws a lot of money around certainly helps private industry:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State
This also does not diminish the entrepreneurs that, once the baton is handed to them, charge forward. My main argument is that there's not as much "bootstrapping" as many people believe.