“He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer
The great cyberpunk writers of the 20th century understood something we’ve forgotten: the most dangerous moment in dystopian world, isn’t when the technology arrives fully formed. It’s in the messy, unregulated space where it’s being built. Gibson and Dick and Sterling wrote about corners cut in the pursuit of speed, about populations considered acceptable losses, about the moment you realize the future everyone was debating has already arrived for people who never consented to be part of it.
And that’s exactly how I feel about BCI technology and companies like Neuralink. While people like Elon Musk fixate on the dystopian possibilities these technologies might bring, I think we risk allowing a dystopian present to happen right now, while we’re all still arguing about what might come next.
Look, I know Part 1 was a lot. I dropped you into detention facilities and mysterious deaths and patterns that feel almost too dark to be real. I forgot that not everyone spends their Friday nights cross-referencing federal contracts with detention center locations and tracking shell companies through MapQuest links that shouldn’t exist. So let’s take a step back. Before we can understand what might be happening in the gaps where documentation goes missing, we need to understand what Neuralink actually is, how this technology works, and why the people who knew it best decided they wanted nothing to do with it.
Because Neuralink didn’t just appear fully formed as the operation it is now. There’s a pattern to how they’ve built this company, and once you see it, the concerns from Part 1 start making a different kind of sense.
The Technology That Already Exists
First, let me say something that might surprise you: brain-computer interfaces aren’t some far-future sci-fi concept. This technology has been in human beings for decades.
The very first brain implant that allowed someone to control an external device happened back in 1998, when Kevin Warwick, a British scientist, had a chip implanted in his arm that let him operate a robotic hand. In 2001, Jesse Sullivan received a bionic arm he could control with his thoughts after losing both arms in an electrical accident. These were real, functional prosthetics that gave people back real capabilities, developed through years of careful research with transparent safety protocols and peer-reviewed published results.
And I want to say this upfront: this technology is genuinely incredible. It’s why I’ve spent the last year studying it so obsessively. The potential to give paralyzed people the ability to walk again, to let someone who’s lost all mobility communicate with their family, to restore independence to people who’ve lost it through injury or disease— that’s transformative. The technology itself isn’t the problem. It’s what certain people are doing with it that should concern us.
The $26 Billion Arms Race
The BCI industry was worth $10.7 billion in 2020 and is projected to hit $26 billion by 2026, and that kind of explosive growth doesn’t happen from medical devices alone. The United States and China are in an open competition over who controls the next frontier of human capability, and both countries have explicitly identified brain-computer interfaces as a national security priority. When multiple superpowers and nuclear states all agree something is strategically important, you should probably pay attention.
On the U.S. side, the BRAIN Initiative has allocated $6 billion in funding from 2012 to 2025, with significant portions coming from DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, essentially the mad science department of the U.S. government. And the military applications aren’t hidden or classified. They publish papers about this stuff. They openly discuss visual and auditory augmentation for soldiers, exoskeletons controlled by thought, weapon systems that respond to neural commands, brain-to-brain communication between squad members. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has publicly stated their goal of creating “human-machine hybrid intelligence” to maintain battlefield superiority. That’s a direct quote.
China has its own Brain Project operating under “military-civil fusion”; a policy ensuring that any civilian technological breakthrough can be rapidly converted to military use. The Congressional Research Service has officially designated brain-computer interfaces as dual-use technology requiring export controls. That’s Washington’s diplomatic way of saying: this is a weapon, even when it’s being sold as a medical device. Russia’s pouring money into it. Israel’s IDF has substantial BCI research programs. Every major military power on earth is treating this technology like the next nuclear capability — something you need to develop before your adversaries do, regardless of the risks.
Watch What They Show You
And that’s why, when you watch Neuralink demos and presentations, you need to pay attention to what they’re actually showing you. It’s never someone with ALS learning to brush their teeth independently. It’s never someone navigating job applications or attending virtual therapy sessions or doing any of the daily living activities that would demonstrate this technology helping disabled people live better lives. It’s always someone playing Call of Duty. Clicking targets as fast as possible. Demonstrating reaction time, precision, speed. Combat metrics.
Every demo focuses on cursor speed championships, click precision records, how fast someone can target and engage. The benchmarks they emphasize, the improvements they celebrate, the metrics they track — it’s all military-coded. And yet we’re supposed to believe this is purely a medical device for helping people with disabilities. The disconnect between what they say it’s for and what they keep demonstrating tells you everything you need to know about the actual priorities.
How Neuralink Is… Different
Now, Neuralink isn’t the only company working on brain-computer interfaces. Blackrock Neurotech has been implanting BCIs in humans for over 20 years, with extensive published research and peer-reviewed results. Paradromics has achieved higher bandwidth than Neuralink with over 1,600 electrode channels and transparent trial protocols. Synchron developed an approach that can be inserted through blood vessels rather than requiring open brain surgery, and they’re backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, conducting FDA-approved trials in the U.S. and Australia with regular published updates.
These companies operate the way medical device companies are supposed to operate: transparent clinical trials, peer-reviewed publications, data shared with the scientific community, regulatory compliance, independent oversight. But Neuralink operates differently.
They didn’t initially want to register their clinical trial on ClinicalTrials.gov — the public database where all legitimate medical research is supposed to be documented. The trial is called PRIME, which stands for:
Precisely Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface
(the acronym barely works, but I digress).
They only registered after significant public backlash, and even then it was months into human trials. The whole point of ClinicalTrials.gov is transparency. Anyone — including patients, researchers, journalists, and regulators, can look up a trial and see what’s happening: how many participants, what the protocols are, what adverse events have occurred, whether the study is following its own rules.
Except Neuralink’s PRIME registry is almost never up to date. The information is sparse, vague, often months behind what’s actually happening. Major announcements about patients don’t come through proper scientific channels. They come via X posts. Yes, Elon Musk is literally tweeting about brain surgery results instead of publishing peer-reviewed data. He posts graphs with no actual numbers, just vague upward-trending lines. He makes claims about capability and safety based on sample sizes so small they’re statistically meaningless.
Everything is obfuscated to the point where I genuinely don’t understand how anyone invests in this company with any confidence.
(You know what you can invest in with full confidence though?? Subscribing to the $5/month Rough Rider Tier <3)
You don’t have to understand neural engineering or read FDA filings to grasp this much: when the surgeon tasked with putting devices in people’s brains decides he can’t stay, that means something went very wrong. And when most of the founding scientists quietly follow him out the door, it’s not a coincidence.
They’d seen enough to make up their minds, and to make everyone else’s heart drop once we found out why.
So, what exactly is Musk building?
2016: The Founding
Neuralink was founded in 2016 with eight co-founders. It seemed to be a mix of tech entrepreneurs looking for the next big thing, paired with Real scientists with serious credentials: neuroscientists who’d spent decades studying the brain, robotics experts who understood the engineering challenges, bioengineers who knew how to interface technology with living tissue.
The founding team included Benjamin Rapoport (neurosurgeon), Dongjin Seo (UC Berkeley, electrical engineering), Max Hodak (neuroscience background, later became president), Paul Merolla (IBM brain-inspired chip researcher), Philip Sabes (neuroscience professor, UCSF), Tim Gardner (neuroscience professor, Boston University), Tim Hanson (electrical engineering, applied physics), and Vanessa Tolosa (biomedical engineer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).
These were people who understood that putting hardware inside the human brain is one of the most delicate, dangerous, high-stakes medical procedures possible. One mistake and you’re not dealing with a software bug you can patch with a couple extra GPU’s. You’re dealing with permanent neurological damage, paralysis, cognitive impairment, and more than likely — death. For the first couple of years, everything seemed ambitious, albeit, but legitimate. The kind of moonshot project you’d expect from someone with Musk’s resources and ego. Difficult, maybe unrealistic on the timelines he was promising, but at least grounded in actual science with actual scientists leading the way.
And then people started leaving.
In 2018, Benjamin Rapoport, head neurosurgeon, left Neuralink. The person whose literal job would be to open people’s skulls and place hardware inside their brains without hurting them. The person with the most direct, immediate responsibility for patient safety left citing safety concerns. Then (and this is the part that should make everyone pay attention), he immediately founded a competing company called Precision Neuroscience, with the explicit stated goal of developing a safer approach to brain-computer interfaces than what Neuralink was planning.
Let that word sit with you for a second. The neurosurgeon who was in the room when decisions were being made, who knew the plan, who knew what the device looked like, who understood the testing protocols they intended to follow; he looked at what Neuralink was building and thought, “I need my name as far away from this as possible.”
That’s seems to be more than just someone disagreeing with a business strategy, wanting more equity, or having a personality clash with Elon Musk (though god knows that would be understandable). That’s the person with the most expertise in the most critical role making a moral and professional judgment that what Neuralink was planning to do was dangerous enough that he needed to actively work against it, whilst calling attention to the FDA.
In 2018, when Rapoport left, Neuralink hadn’t done any human trials yet. They were still in the planning stages, still working on the device, still developing protocols. Which means whatever he saw that made him leave was in the design itself, in the approach they were planning to take, in the safety margins they were willing to accept. His departure was framed as a difference in vision. But what came next: the testing, the cover-ups, the casualties — would make his warning look almost merciful.
Because the real story of Neuralink doesn’t start when he left the building. It starts with what they did after he was gone.
Part 3 will pick up there: inside the labs, after the doors closed. The animal trials. The missing reports. The employees who tried to speak up and disappeared behind NDAs. All of the evidence proving Rapoport was right, and that by the time anyone listened, it was already too late.
Sources Cited
Neuralink’s 1,000 implant goal:
Teslarati. “Elon Musk: over 1,000 humans with Neuralink implants in 2026 is feasible.” July 12, 2024.
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-over-1000-humans-neuralink-implants-2026/BCI industry market projections:
Grand View Research. “Brain Computer Interface Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report.” 2024.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/brain-computer-interfaces-marketDARPA BRAIN Initiative funding:
National Institutes of Health. “The BRAIN Initiative.” 2025.U.S. Army Research Laboratory human-machine hybrid intelligence:
U.S. Army Research Laboratory. “The Third Wave of Artificial Intelligence.” Technical Report, 2018.China’s Brain Project and military-civil fusion:
Congressional Research Service. “China’s Biotechnology Development: The Role of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.” February 2021.Blackrock Neurotech clinical history:
Blackrock Neurotech. “Our History.” Company website, 2025.Synchron clinical trials:
ClinicalTrials.gov. “Synchron Stentrode™ with Thought-Controlled Digital Switch.” NCT03834857.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03834857Neuralink PRIME study registration:
ClinicalTrials.gov. “Safety and Efficacy of Neuralink’s Fully-Implantable Wireless Brain-Computer Interface.” NCT06589642.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06589642Rafael Yuste neurorights research:
Yuste, Rafael, et al. “Four ethical priorities for neurotechnologies and AI.” Nature, Vol. 551, November 2017.
https://www.nature.com/articles/551159aBenjamin Rapoport founding of Precision Neuroscience:
https://qz.com/neuralink-brain-chip-safety-elon-musk-benjamin-rapoport-1851460604Neuralink co-founders:
Bloomberg. “Elon Musk Launches Neuralink to Connect Brains With Computers.” March 27, 2017.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-27/elon-musk-launches-neuralink-to-connect-brains-with-computers
Additional Research
Note: Additional sources for founder departures, clinical trial protocols, and military BCI applications are being compiled through academic databases and will be updated as information becomes available.
Investigative Methodology:
This article is based on publicly available information including scientific publications, company announcements, clinical trial registries, and news reports. Claims about patterns and connections represent the author’s analysis of documented facts and timelines. Readers are encouraged to review primary sources and draw their own conclusions.
