Well, Elon Muski is now the richest person on the planet.
More than half the satellites in space are owned and controlled by one man.
Starting his own artificial intelligence company. Well, he's a legitimate, super genius. Legitimate, he says. He's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different.
He'll vote Republican.
There is a reason the US government is so reliant on him.
Elon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Anything he does is fascinating the people.
Hello, and welcome to bonus episode of Elaning. I'm David Papadopolos, your host of the show, where we discuss Elon Musk's vast corporate empire, his latest gambits and antics, and how to make sense of it all. We are coming to you twice this week. Trust me. Now, this be a regular thing, but we have something really special to share.
Elon Musk. Biographer and BusinessWeek reporter Ashley Vance has written a cover story for the magazine on Neuralink, Musk's biotech startup that makes SpaceX goal to go to Mars look pedestrian. This company aims to do nothing less than put chips in human brains. Here's how Musk explained the idea back in twenty nineteen at the Neuralink launch event.
Meaning that we can ultimately.
Yeah, those are gonna sound pretty weird, but achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.
Ashley has gotten exclusive access to Neuralink's labs and has done intensive reporting on what is and isn't happening inside one of Musk's most controversial companies. To discuss this and more, we've beamed him in from powel alto Welcome Ashley, Thanks for having me. We've also got with us Sarah McBride, who covers Neuralink for Bloomberg. Hello, Sarah, Thanks so Ashley. We'll start with you. You spent lots of time inside the lab these past few years for this story. You know,
hit me with your with your main findings. I should I be, should I in humanity be more excited than scared about all this? Or vice versa?
Well, I think you know.
My big takeaway is that neuralinks a little bit different that Elon has been pitching it for the last couple of years. Elon always brings us as like this big leap forward and creating cyborgs between between humans and machines, and you know that that billions of people are gonna put their hand up to have this elective surgery to
put a brain implant into their heads. The reality is, you know, for the foreseeable future, this device really will be aimed at people in the worst you know, suffering from very debilitating conditions like prows, the strokes, als, things like that, and this brain implant has the promise of helping them communicate with their loved ones, to use a computer, possibly even to when they're paralyzed, to get sensation and
movement back in their limbs. And so, you know, this was my big takeaway from the story is that, in typical Elon fashion, he's kind of presented this thing in its most fanciful terms, but the actual reality of it is very exciting and just just more pragmatic and aimed at a different group of people.
You also have Musk quoted in here talking about how down the road, the reason why this thing all has to happen super fast is to stave off and defeat artificial intelligence. The quote is, we need to get there before the AI takes over. We want to get there with a maniacal sense of urgency maniacal. I mean, Sarah, help me here.
I'd say maniacal is on target. He's definitely reporting. He's just pushing those employees so hard to move fast. And you have to be a little bit maniacal to talk about putting implants in somebody's brain. One thing that surprised me when I started reporting on neuralink was how many thousands of people are walking around this earth with implants in their brains already. But what he wants to do is just far more ambitious than some of these other
companies which are really specialized. These chips might fix episodes of epilepsy, for example, or help somebody with Parkinson's, and his ambitions are just so much broader than that.
Yeah, So talk to me for a second about what the rest of the industry looks like. There are companies out there that are ahead of neuralink, Sarah.
Yeah, in some ways. In some ways, there are companies that you know, for years have put implants in people's brains. They some of them have been very ugly and required you to only use them in lab settings. You might have some sort of protrusion from the back of your head while using these what Elan Musk has done has kind of raised the standards, so that now baseline for anybody who's trying to make an implant is it has to be invisible. It has to be hidden under the
skin of your scalp at the very least. That's table stakes now. And because he's interested, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars have flown into this space.
Yeah, to that point on the difference between what he's doing and what others have done so far already. You know, Ashley in the piece, you call it the world's most powerful and elegant brain implant.
Why well, you know, to Sarah's point, the existing devices, if you look at some of their immediate competitors, just in terms of raw computer horsepower, the typical devices have about sixteen electrodes on these these thin wires that get embedded somewhere in your body, and neuralinksaplant will have more than a thousand, you know, I mean, this is just
a huge leap forward in terms of computing. And then also to Sarah's point, you know, the other devices have a separate, very large hardware unit that contains the battery
computing systems to amplify signals coming from your brain. Neuralink has baked everything into a quarter sized device that fits completely flush with your skull and is rechargeable wirelessly, So you know, it's much closer to like what you would think of with a consumer electrotronics product, whereas everything else really looks like it's come from a research laboratory of.
The existing products. But there are also several companies in development. There's you know, at least one other precision neuroscience that's also working on over one thousand electrodes. So you can see a future where there'll be many companies with variations on this theme, and maybe Neuralink will have more of something and another company will have more of something else.
So the ideas we're going to stave off as muscas, that we're going to stave off sci fi, and we're gonna defeat AI with this, and we're going to defeat the bots. I guess my question is if I'm having an implant put in my brain in which I am, information is being downloaded in my brain and so there's this flow back and forth, isn't there not the risk that I become essentially controlled, I become a bot myself.
This is the central flow with most of Elon's AI. You know, shoebag I me he this is a guy who says AI might ruin the human species and send us all into doom. And yet you know he's He's funded now too. AI research startups. Tesla has as many AI researchers as you could possibly have.
Remember when pacemakers came out and people predicted that those with pacemakers would die in their thousands when people took over their pacemakers and turned them off, and that just never happened. I mean not to say it won't, right, but I sometimes think the worst case scenarios are over dramatized, and then the medium and poor case scenarios, or I think there's far more chance that things will go mildly wrong.
All right now, Sarah, they have not put any of these in any humans human heads yet, plenty of animal heads, no human heads. But Sarah, there is no shortage of Volunteers's right.
You can go on to acts and see them people tweeting at Elon musk Hey I volunteer. Several years ago, when Neuralink was at a much earlier phase, somebody who worked there said they regularly got messages from people sometimes people standing outside the door of the offices then saying that they volunteer. And also there are lots of really sick people whose doctors are recommending they try various trials
that are along these lines. So I think they can, through legitimate medical channels, find people who are willing to try one of these. And no, they haven't been in human brains yet, and some of the other companies started by people who used to work at Neuralink have already had, Like Precision Neuroscience was just in a human brain, albeit very briefly in a hospital surgical setting. But in some ways they're behind some of these other next generation companies all right now.
But actually, if I remember correctly, they have been. Neuralink has been and is in the brains of monkeys, pigs, and sheep. And there have been a lot of reports out there from our competitors about cruelty to animals and how they've been excessive in many cases. At neuralink, what did you find during your reporting.
I mean, animal testing is unpleasant. You know, we've sort of made a choice as a species that we're going to do this kind of thing, and there's no getting around that. The actual care that the animals had that. I saw the monkeys, the sheep, the pigs, they have things to play with. It's mostly volunteer, you know, So just so people understand, I mean, I was in a room with monkeys sitting in front of laptop screens while they were playing games using their their thoughts.
I think you wrote Ashley that it's even it looks even weirder than it sounds. It sounds pretty weird.
I mean, it's pretty strange to go to room with a bunch of bunkies on laptops and you know, sometimes they're using their their hands and sometimes they're just using their thoughts to move these cursors around the screen. They just kind of go and sit in front of the screen and they have a smoothie that they can pick from an iPad what kind of smoothie they want. Well, they while they do their test. When they're finished, they don't want to do it anymore. They just they just kind of leave.
During the reporting over these several years, you saw some of the monkeys throughout that time, right.
Yeah, I mean this has been one of the contentions, is that the neuralink, you know, was rushing these procedures. The stories make it sound like they were sort of dying all the time. All I can tell you is that I saw the same group of seventeen monkeys over three years, and they were always the same, and they appeared healthy and were doing their tests.
And that's what I saw.
And just to be clear, Neuralink stresses that the most troubling reports come from its early years before it built its own testing facility in Fremont, and it says it's gone to great lengths to provide better living conditions there.
I went to the old UC Davis Neuralink facility and they drove me around the outside pens only. I was not allowed to go inside where the actual experiments and research was taking place. And I think that's telling that they just didn't allow reporters in that area at all. And it sounds like what you saw was very different. I think there's a big difference between how are the
animals cared for and how is the surgery done? And a lot of the reporting indicated many of the mistakes were during the surgeries, unfortunately, and that's a whole different team from the people who actually take care of the animals, which is totally true, Ashley.
There are in the story. There are scenes of what I call musk speed, where he just wants to go go, go. Back to the maniacal aspect of it. How does musk speed and that we got to go a million miles an hour square and jive with treeding the animals?
Okay, well, you know, mostly at the point they're at now. I mean, he just wants to barrel forward with this clinical trial on the humans, and so musk speed is kind of a I don't just want to implant one person. I want to ride out of the gate implant as
many as possible. And so I was in some meetings where you know, these poor lieutenants had the job of telling Elon that was not going to be possible, and I think, you know, as a quote in there age just as unacceptable, you know, when he's told that they'll only be able to implant one one human out of the get go. My overall impression is that, you know,
these stories are hard to read. All I can tell you is that my overall impression is that people were looking out for the welfare of the animals, and they're all trying to sort of get to this place where they can help humans who are in pretty dire circumstances, and you know, Elon does add a lot of pressure, and so you know there's the chance for kind of irrational decisions to happen in that. But I did come away, you know, impressed overall.
So at the same time, right, so moving away from the animals to the humans, right, you have musk speed on the one hand, and then on the other hand, you have all the risks that come with this as they start going, especially in the human brains. You have the director of Special Projects there at Neuralink, Shavonzilla, saying in your piece, we can't blow up the first three being brains. I e. This is not SpaceX putting rockets
up into space. That's not an option here. You also go on to say, and this is in your own words, you say, you know, God, if you know chemicals started leaking into the brain, which is a frightening thought. I mean, how great is the risk here in terms of legal risks and so on.
Well, I mean this is about as risky as it gets, you know, I mean, if something goes wrong. This is Historically Elon's companies have had false starts. SpaceX did blow up its first three rockets. It took Tesla almost a decade to be able to mass.
Produce a car.
You know, there's really not that same sort of room for error because this first person presumably will be able to communicate on some level, you know, with the outside where they're going to be paralyzed, but they likely can just talk and tell us their experience with this implant. They had to submit fifteen thousand pages of tests data and other data to the FDA, which is, you know,
just even more than a rocket to get this. To get this approved, I saw some strange machines that they had built to put the implant through, you know, to simulate five ten years of use in this kind of synthetic brain fluid that been that.
They had created.
And so but you know, yeah, this I think it's kind of like a make or break moment in some ways.
That was the point I was trying to get at.
So Ashley, we quoted Shavon Zillis talking about the risk of blowing up brains here. Now, there is some funkiness here that's made some in the corporate governance world and in the investing world a little uneasy because she and Elon have twins together. What's that situation like they're inside inside the company, and how loud at this point are the critics speaking.
You know, Historically, Chavon has been this special projects kind of person for Elon, jumping from from company to company to work on different things, although she did focus on Neuralink quite a bit for years. And Neuralink is essentially run by I mean, Elon's the CEO, but he only comes in and out every few weeks and it's basically run by three people. It used to be four, including Chavon. She's stepped away from the company a lot since she's had the twins.
The company's shifted its base of.
Operations from Fremont, California to Austin, Texas, where Elon and Chevon live, and so you know, that's kind of the heart in the future of the company. I think there's been a ton in the tabloids about Chavon and Elon's relationship.
It's clearly unusual, I think for investors.
I mean, Neuralinks had no problem raising money and it's a it's a private company, and you know, like I say, Chavon's kind of pulled away from a lot of the day to day stuff that she used to do.
There.
Sarah beck to you, you said, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in this company, largely by Musk. Any sense of its value now and where it stands in the constellation of elon companies in terms of its valuation and its place in that constellation.
Lusk gave I think the first hundred million dollars for the company, and since then he has raised money from other legitimate venture capital firms. So it's very hard to tell what the actual valuation of the company would be. I think medical device makers have this issue in general, where their stock prices, if they're publicly traded, go up and down, and nobody really knows until the device or the jug of whatever it is they're trying to make its final approval, and then you see a dramatic rise
in the valuation of the company. So it's sort of foolish to try to guess what the valuation of Neuralink would be at this point. Maybe there'll be a better idea after it does finally go into some human brains. And there is also a point I'd like to make about this school of thought in brain implants neuralinks, trying to get those electrodes as close as possible to neurons. But there are also a lot of very smart people
who believe that's the wrong philosophy. That it's like, if you're looking at a painting and you go right up and look at the job of paint, you're going to have no idea what the painting's about. You need to step back a little bit. So there are a lot of people who think that the best place for the electrodes is on the surface of the brain rather than deep into the brain. And those companies have raised plenty of money as well, and some of them are founded
by former neuralink people. So there are a lot of smart people who think very different techniques will work for the same ends.
Yeah, to that end. Actually, there are also right in the industry, there is a sense a little bit related to musk speed. It doesn't publish scientific papers and journals that could be tested and verified by the scientific community the way others would. How much of that did you encounter and those sort of doubts creeping in.
Well, you know, their only real form of communication with the outside world over these last few years has been these public demonstrations that they've done about three or four times, and you know, each time they've kind of been knocked for basically replicating science that had happened many years earlier in a laboratory and just kind of showing that they
could do it as well. And so and then Elon gets on stage and it says, you know, we're going from this thing that's already been accomplished by somebody else to you know, but we're going to surpass the ball and by leaps and bounds.
So you know, the proof is in the putting.
I mean, the thing that I was most impressed by is the surgical robot, which is this like work of engineering arts, and nobody else really has.
Something comparable to that. And the device itself really is like amazing.
I mean, it's a it's got a battery in there, Neuralink makes their own semiconductors, it's got all these amplifiers to send this.
Like the amount of equipment it's.
Replacing would be like a refrigerator sized stack of computing hardware in this tiny thing. And so you know, to that, to that end, like they have accomplished something. The huge question is like what is this human actually going to be able to do? And is it more than what has come before?
All right. So this brings me to my last question, which is on a scale of zero to ten, zero being no way, ten being hell yeah. Would you be up for having one of these things be put in your brain?
Ashley Bands right now, no way.
If you're a sero, I'll take my rocket, my rocket to the moon, first rocket.
Sarah McBride, Absolutely not, unless I was paralyzed. Then we'd go from like zero right now to like seven. I would totally consider it.
That's actually it's a fantastic boy.
I know Sarah begel this before because I've talked to a couple of people who had spinal implants for the story, and I mean they're like begging to get this done, you know. So it does depend on your life circumstances quite drastically.
Elon said at one point that if one of his own children needed this device, he wouldn't hesitate for one of his kids to have it if they needed it.
All right, So, personally, I'm not having this thing put in my brain until I see the whites of the eyes of the AI bots coming at me. All right, that's it. Let's call it quits. Thanks for listening to Elon Inc. And thanks to our special guests and.
Sarah, thanks so much, Thank you very much.
You can read Ashley's article in this week's issue of BusinessWeek and at bloomberg dot com slash BusinessWeek. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and this episode was produced by Stacy Wan. Naomi Shaven and Rayhan Harmanci are our senior editors. The idea for this very show also came from Rayhan. Blake Maples handles engineering, and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocow thanks a bunch of BusinessWeek editor Joel Weber as well. The elin ing theme is written and
performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiira. Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts and our executive producer. If you have a minute, rate and review the show, it'll help other listeners find us. I am David Papadopoulos. See you next week.
Stept still extant.