Interesting that you picked two examples where the innovation wasn’t commercialized and the innovator did not become rich. I suspect there‘s some cultural aspect to that.

IMO this is a big difference: I'd actually feel quit bad about becoming rich off th back oef a technology or innovation that I could have made more open and widely available.

Would you say Windows is not widely available?

Uhm, Linus makes seven figures.

And his nearest peers made 10 figures.

30 years ago and 40 years ago, respectively

30 years ago you would have said that Microsoft dominates and www is a niche thing. And Turing was already 50 years ago.

It’s likely that something significant is going on in Europe that we don’t know about yet.

It's easy to point to hundred-billion dollar projects in the US from the last 20 years.

LHC at CERN (Switzerland), XFEL at DESY in Hamburg (Germany), ITER in France, etc. (probably all have a lot of non-EU funding though)

The EU Horizon 2020 budget is 70 billion EUR, spent over basically 6 years. Around 80 billion is now being spent as post-pandemic stimulus, but less than what was proposed by the Commission.

That said, you're probably right that US pumps hundreds of billions into "innovation" (let's say R&D) whereas it's just a hundred for the EU.

Fortunately the EU is catching up, but alas it's not because it's so aggressively allocating more for R&D, though the trend is positive, but the US' trend is at best flat, maybe even negative: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (Of course these are GDP percentages, and since the US' economy is bigger, the absolute numbers are a lot bigger for the US. And that's why even though Japan's percentage looks best, their absolute amount is below what the EU spends on R&D.)