Twitter Precision- Innovation

The internet is a difficult place for a precise person. Twitter is like the rest of the internet times a billion. You get rapid flow of "information" combined with a 140 character limit. This does not lend itself to precision.

In response to a lovely libertarian tweet slamming academia and claiming private innovation is the driver behind technological progress I responded:

"'The largest innovations in tech...come from the private sector.' Wrong. The private sector monetizes the academic discoveries.Ugh"

Now, that isn't exactly precise. It could easily be taken that I am saying no innovation comes from the private sector. This would obviously be an absurd statement on my part and would be completely inaccurate instead of a simple broad generalization. Then you get the the response: "like the lightbulb, telephone, internet, tablets, MP3 players, smart cars??? Please. Provide some examples"
The precise person inside of me is screaming to engage this person. To enlighten them a bit and encourage them to expand their knowledge and clarify I was not stating that that no innovation comes from the private sector. A brief perusal of their twitter feed showed me this would be a wasted effort as they are a gamergate supporter. There is no discussing with those fools. Instead, I'll do it here. We're going to throw out the telephone & the light bulb. I'm going to make an assumption and believe the tweeter thinks Edison invented the light bulb. He did not. He "perfected" the light bulb so it could be monetized. However, universities in the 19th century were very different than universities in the 20th & 21st centuries. So, the internet. The internet got its start at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is not a private company. In fact it, much like NASA and many other government research arms are far closer to evil academia than they are to private companies. So, the government invented the internet. Have many private companies improved on it? Yes! Have many monetized it? Yes! Did they "invent" it? No. Tablets. Tablets are merely small touchscreen computers. Obviously the tweeter is a blithering idiot as they're essentially more complex versions of MP3 players (also small computers. I'm amazed he didn't throw in smart phones, lets just name different versions of the same thing.) Computers have been around for a couple hundred years, but modern ones did get started with lots of private work. Transistor based computers (the ones we use today) use transistors developed at Bell Labs. A private research facility that came out of Alexander Bell's Volta Labs and was run heavily by AT&T it developed a whole lot of stuff. But back to tablets. Which have touchscreens. Which were invented, by accident, in an academic lab. By someone who also worked at Oak Ridge National Labs. So, MP3 players & tablets were about the worst computer examples they could pick. Smart cars. Where to even begin? How do they not see this is the monetization phase of technology that's been developed in all sorts of places. You have AI, you have video technology, sensor technology, I mean, nobody was just in a lab anywhere and discovered a freaking smart car! (or a computer, or a tablet, or a well, most anything really, that's not how science works.) All of which plays into the point, the guy had no clue what he is talking about. But there is no engaging people like that. Which is sad and frustrating. There are many, many examples of scientific progress coming from the private sector. But that's not what the private sector exists to do for the most part. (We are seeing a resurgence to a degree it seems.) The private sector exists to figure out how to use abstract scientific discoveries and turn them into something concrete it can package and sell. There is nothing wrong with that but merely stating "Private companies created the smart car" does little do disprove my initial, if imprecise point.