Musk Shares More Than a Tweet About Brain Implant Tech

Elon Musk has incurred many labels during his five decades on Earth: business magnate, angel investor (both obvious), disruptor, visionary, micromanager, “technoking” (self-branded), rapper, Red Planet pioneer, AI critic, bit part actor, and Twitter rebrander, to name just a few.

Perhaps the most fitting rubric, however, is enigma.

Musk, 52, is not an easy man to understand. Curiously, he is more transparent than most chief executives, yet he revels in keeping his stockholders (and the general populace) guessing.

Consider his strategy for conquering the electric car market: Just two years after becoming Tesla Inc.’s largest shareholder in 2004, Musk publicly outlined his “secret” master plan for manufacturing and commercializing electric vehicles (it was quite forthright, actually). In 2014, he went public with all Tesla patents “in the spirit of the open source movement…” and then a few years later—seemingly out of nowhere—tweeted his intention to take Tesla public before abruptly backpedaling on the plan.

“This is a guy who’s more transparent than 99.99 percent of other CEOs and yet he’s harder to predict because he has the confidence to be able to publicly change his mind,” Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business and law professor, told the Associated Press in 2022. “Would Musk be more successful if he toned it down? I think the answer is no, because he wouldn’t be Musk.”

Indeed, a more low-key Musk might be unusual, but it wouldn’t necessarily be surprising. He is, after all, unpredictable.

Such a public persona switch might help explain the lack of detailed information about the brain implant developed by Musk’s neurotechnology company, Neuralink Corp.

In February, Musk touted success with the firm’s first human trial subject, announcing that a patient had moved a computer mouse with only his thoughts.

“Progress is good, patient seems to have made a full recovery…and is able to control the mouse, move the mouse around the screen just by thinking,” Musk said in an X Spaces conversation.
Last spring, Neuralink received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to conduct its first in-human clinical study. The company’s brain-computer interface (BCI) implant is designed to help severely paralyzed patients control external technologies like smartphones, computers, or other electronics using only neural signals. Neuralink works similar to existing brain-machine interfaces by collecting electrical signals sent out by the brain and interpreting them as actions.

Neuralink’s first products—while still years away from commercialization—will be used to restore lost functions to parlyzed or visually impaired people, Musk has previously said, though he has failed to provide details.

Musk, in fact, has been unusually tight-lipped about the progress of BCI’s technology. The few updates he has provided have come through brief social media posts—a tactic that does not sit well with the scientific and academic communities.

“What truly puzzles me about this is not the technology itself but the way of communicating scientific news,” Marcello Ienca, a professor of ethics of artificial intelligence and neuroscience at Technical University of Munich, told Forbes. He criticized Musk for sharing information about Neuralink and its work “through casual social media updates” rather than traditional science-related outlets such as peer reviewed publications, public repositories, or simple pre-prints.

Musk’s penchant for communicating in fewer than 280 characters “seems to sidestep the established protocols that underpin scientific integrity,” Ienca griped, and said it prevents experts from evaluating or understanding “the full scope and impact” of any claimed advances.

“A tweet is not exactly a peer-reviewed scientific report,” agreed L. Syd M Johnson, an ethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities. She noted to Forbes that Musk’s brief update about the first human implantation gave few details about the patient’s recovery, his degree of control over the mouse, and whether “mouse” actually meant the onscreen cursor.
Neither Neuralink nor Musk has responded to the complaints but an April 12 blog post seemed to answer many of the questions raised by critics. The post was created to provide a “high-level” snapshot of the company, its mission, its technology, the study currently being conducted, and the work still ahead.

The implant itself, according to the blog, aims to address the restoration of digital autonomy to people living with quadriplegia due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The N1 Implant device is designed to record neural activity through 1,024 electrodes distributed across 64 flexible leads, or “threads,” each of which are thinner than a human hair and capable of being placed independently in the brain.

The blog also provided more detail (in more than 280 words) about the Prime study and implantation, the latter of which was performed at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. The blog quoted Michael T. Lawton, M.D., president and CEO of Barrow Neurological Institute: “The PRIME Study will likely be viewed as ushering in an era of brain-computer interface, or direct interaction between thoughts and implantable technology.”