Inside Neuralink, Elon Musk’s mysterious brain chip startup: A culture of blame, impossible deadlines, and a missing CEO

At first glance, the video is impressive: A monkey plays the classic Atari game Pong, using only its mind, its mental commands wirelessly transmitted to a computer. Uploaded to YouTube on April 8, 2021, it has been viewed 5.7 million times and received some 120,000 likes.

Among those who really like the clip is Elon Musk. That’s not just because monkey MindPong is the kind of sci-fi stuff that gets Musk jazzed. It’s because that monkey—it’s named Pager, the video’s narrator tells us—is Musk’s monkey. Or rather, Pager belongs to Neuralink, a company Musk founded in 2016. Neuralink is dedicated to developing a device that, once implanted in the human brain, would allow a computer to translate a person’s thoughts into action—eventually allowing the individual to do anything we do today through typing, pressing buttons, or manipulating a mouse or joystick—by simply thinking about the desired result instead. It would also, Musk says, allow information to be beamed from a computer back into the brain. Musk has said that in the future we’ll all need such brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs—that the only way to keep up with rapidly advancing artificial intelligence will be to merge with the machines, cyborg-style.

If that sounds bonkers, well, it is. But this is Elon Musk we’re talking about. The guy who has done more than anyone else to make electric cars a reality. The guy who regularly blasts rockets into space carrying both satellites and astronauts, and then safely lands the booster stages back on Earth—vertically, and sometimes on floating autonomous barges—so they can be reused.

Musk has a reputation for accomplishing engineering feats that others believe are technically improbable and turning them into revenue-generating businesses. But Musk also has a reputation for overhyping his technologies and missing promised timelines (see Full Self-Driving) and production targets (see Tesla, Model 3).

Neuralink's brain implants could begin human clinical trials as soon as this year. But have Musk's grandiose promises about their capabilities raised hopes too high?

Read Now