In October 2025, Neuralink announced new facilities in San Francisco, a move that felt oddly out of step with the playbook we’ve seen from Musk’s other ventures, all of which have been pounding the drum for Texas in recent years. California is supposedly over-regulated, too liberal, hostile to business — the whole script. So why go back? If it’s such a hellscape, why return?
In Part 5, I started mapping out the money trails, tracing six hundred and fifty million dollars in fresh funding as it moved through a web of investors and special-purpose vehicles, with major foreign investment carefully tucked into the structure. I followed those flows to understand who was at the top, who was in the middle, and who was being purposefully hidden from view.
But that work left me with a different question, one that felt more concrete and potentially more revealing. If the capital flows and ownership structures are this carefully obscured, where is that money actually being spent? Physical infrastructure doesn’t hide as easily as a Delaware LLC. Labs, machine shops, manufacturing lines, facility expansions — all of that has to exist somewhere in the real world, with permits and paperwork, utility hookups and property records that leave trails in ways that corporate structures don’t.
So my next step was straightforward enough. I went looking for the places where Neuralink was actually putting down roots, building things, hiring people. If so much effort had gone into shielding where the money comes from, I wanted to know how much effort was going into shielding what’s being built, and where.
That search led me to 2200 Caldwell Lane in Del Valle, Texas, and things got complicated almost immediately.
River Bottoms Ranch
When I first pulled up the property records, the site looked straightforward enough; a thirty-seven acre parcel sitting along the Colorado River, about twenty minutes southeast of Austin. The Homes.com listing made it look like any other rural Texas property, the kind of place you’d expect to see horses and maybe some cattle, with a few scattered buildings and plenty of open land. Nothing in the listing suggested high technology or medical device manufacturing, and certainly nothing that would indicate brain-computer interfaces or surgical implants.
But when I dug into the ownership records, something didn’t quite add up. The property was listed under a company called River Bottoms Ranch LLC, which had purchased it back in 2021. Not any obviously Musk-affiliated entity. Just a ranch company with a pastoral name. So I started wondering why this particular address kept showing up repeatedly whenever I searched for Neuralink facilities, and whether there was some connection I was missing or if I was just chasing down the wrong lead entirely.
I pulled the LLC filing from the Texas Comptroller’s office to see who was actually behind River Bottoms Ranch, and that’s when things started clicking into place. The LLC’s president was listed as Jared Birchall, and the member was listed as Neuralink Corp. For anyone who’s followed Musk’s business dealings, Jared Birchall’s name should be familiar — he runs Excession LLC, which is Elon Musk’s family office, the entity that manages Musk’s personal wealth and handles the paperwork when Musk doesn’t want his name directly attached to something. And there was Neuralink Corp, listed right there as a member of the LLC, not exactly hidden but not advertised either.
So this isn’t some coincidental real estate investment that happened to share an address with Neuralink operations. This was Neuralink’s facility, just registered under a shell company structure with Musk’s money manager running it on paper. When I looked at the construction documents and permitting paperwork, I found Scott Padilla listed as the primary contact for the project.
A quick check of his LinkedIn profile showed that Padilla is Neuralink’s Design, Construction, and Facilities Lead, with decades of experience in medical device manufacturing and regulatory compliance. So you had this clear division of labor — Birchall running the shell company that owns the property, Padilla running the actual construction and facility development on the ground. The financial structure and the operational reality were both tied directly back to Neuralink, just deliberately obscured behind a name that suggested horses and pastures rather than surgical manufacturing.
As I kept digging into Birchall’s connections, I started noticing this pattern extended well beyond this single property. Horse Ranch LLC, also connected to Birchall, had purchased 620 acres adjacent to Tesla’s Gigafactory. CTC Property LLC and MZX Tech LLC showed similar patterns, both tied to xAI’s Memphis operations. There’s this whole network of pastoral or generic LLC names masking high-value Musk properties across multiple ventures. But in this case, unlike some of the more speculative connections, Neuralink Corp was explicitly listed as a member of the LLC — this was operational infrastructure, not just real estate speculation.
The Math Doesn’t Work
The construction permits for what’s labeled internally as “Project ATX1” described a three-story building spanning 112,000 square feet, designed to house offices, a machine shop, and something the permits simply called “cleanroom device manufacturing.” When I started researching what cleanroom manufacturing actually entails, I learned that these are expensive, highly regulated spaces that companies build when they’re manufacturing products that need to be kept sterile — so in this case, medical implants, surgical devices, things that are going to be placed inside human bodies. The permits I reviewed described ISO certification requirements, constant air filtration systems, and strict contamination controls, all of which aligns with the kind of infrastructure you’d need for medical device production rather than general manufacturing or basic research work.
But here’s what made me stop and really think about the timeline: Construction on this facility began on July 15, 2024. At that exact point in time, Neuralink had implanted their technology in exactly two people in the entire history of the company. Not two hundred patients. Not even twenty. Two human beings had received Neuralink implants, and the company was breaking ground on 112,000 square feet of manufacturing infrastructure designed for medical device production at scale.
The site plans showed something even more striking when I looked at the long-term vision. There’s a structure labeled as “Future Building” with a planned footprint of 278,000 square feet — more than double the size of what’s currently under construction. When you add it all up, the total planned capacity comes to 390,000 square feet of cleanroom manufacturing space, which is roughly the equivalent of seven football fields laid side by side. The property tax records tell the story of this transformation in stark terms: the 2020 assessment valued the property at $350,000, consistent with rural ranch land along the river. By 2025, that assessment had jumped to $6.1 million, representing a documented conversion from agricultural property to industrial facility, with construction phases that according to the permit valuations have totaled nearly $20 million so far.
You don’t build that kind of capacity for clinical trials, where you’re testing a handful of devices to see if the technology even works and whether it’s safe for human use. It seems like you build that when you’ve already decided that mass production is coming – or possibly, is already here.
The Timeline Problem
By November 2025, according to their public statements, Neuralink has thirteen patients total across all of their clinical trials. The trials are moving carefully and methodically, exactly as they should be for experimental brain surgery where you’re literally drilling into people’s skulls and threading electrodes into neural tissue. That kind of caution makes sense — this is uncharted territory, and you need time to understand whether the technology works, whether it’s safe over the long term, what the failure modes look like, how the body responds to having a computer interface embedded in the brain.
But the manufacturing infrastructure tells a completely different story. This facility was designed and construction began as if volume production was already a certainty, as if someone had already made the decision that this technology would work and would need to be manufactured by the thousands. Someone placed a massive bet on this technology before it had been proven to work reliably in humans over any meaningful timeframe, and even now with nearly a year and a half of additional development, the total patient count sits at just thirteen people.
Surgical Hiring
Back in spring 2025, I started finding Neuralink job postings for surgical positions that all specified Austin or Texas as the required location. The positions included an OR Specialist, a Neurosurgeon Resident, and a Surgical Physician Assistant. The Neurosurgeon Resident posting described training protocols for “experimental procedures using human cadavers or large animal subjects,” with the job requiring collaboration between preclinical scientists, veterinary teams, and anesthesiologists. That kind of language fits perfectly with what you’d expect for research facility work — cadaver studies and animal trials that happen before any human testing begins, the groundwork necessary for developing surgical techniques and training personnel before you ever approach the FDA about human trials.
But the OR Specialist posting used different phrasing, and I found myself reading one particular line multiple times because of what it seemed to be saying. The posting described the role as “Participating in preclinical animal studies and human clinical surgeries at Neuralink.” Not at partner hospitals. Not at FDA-approved clinical trial sites. At Neuralink facilities. The posting did mention collaboration with hospital staff for trial coverage, which suggests that at least some portion of the work happens at medical institutions with the kind of independent oversight you’d expect. But the way this sentence is constructed groups both the animal studies and the human surgeries together under the same location descriptor—at Neuralink—and that phrasing raised immediate questions for me about where exactly these procedures are happening and under what kind of regulatory oversight.
In my research on how medical device clinical trials typically operate, I found that the standard framework is pretty explicit about this separation. Trials happen at approved hospitals that have institutional review boards, ethics committees, and independent physicians who aren’t employed by the device company. That regulatory structure exists specifically to ensure that the company developing the technology doesn’t also control the facility where it’s being tested on human subjects, because that kind of control creates obvious conflicts of interest and removes the independent medical oversight that’s supposed to protect trial participants.
The timing of these job postings matters significantly. When these surgical positions were posted in spring 2025, Neuralink’s only approved U.S. trial sites according to FDA documentation and ClinicalTrials.gov were located in Phoenix and Miami. Dallas appeared on the database just last month without any public announcement from the company (I only know because I check periodically) But still, Austin, the city where Neuralink was actively recruiting surgical staff seven months ago, still doesn’t appear anywhere as an approved clinical trial location in any of my searches.
The job postings also explicitly reference large animal research happening at this Austin facility. While I’m not disillusioned by how medical trials in their early stages work, I do find myself worrying about whether IACUC protocols (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee protocols) are being followed on the ranch. I guess federally mandated laws under the Animal Welfare Act, mean something different to some of us.
I haven’t been able to locate any public IACUC documentation for this facility, mind you. However, given what I found in the documented records from Neuralink’s previous work at UC Davis, where fifteen of the twenty-three monkeys in their trials died and veterinary records documented animals scratching at their heads until they drew blood, isn’t a great track record to have. So this is an urgent question about whether the oversight mechanisms that are supposed to prevent animal suffering are actually in place and functioning at this Texas facility.
What the Gap Shows
When I step back and look at everything I’ve documented, I’m seeing two completely different narratives running in parallel. There’s the public narrative that Neuralink presents to the world: they’re conducting careful, limited clinical trials with rigorous FDA oversight, they have thirteen patients enrolled across their approved sites, and they’re progressing methodically through the regulatory pathway as they work to prove the technology is safe and effective.
And then there’s what the operational evidence actually shows: industrial-scale manufacturing infrastructure that was designed and built when the company had successfully implanted just two patients, with planned capacity to produce thousands of devices. Nearly twenty million dollars in construction spending. Surgical staff being recruited for a location that doesn’t appear in any clinical trial registries or public regulatory documentation. All of this infrastructure registered under a shell company called River Bottoms Ranch, with Jared Birchall listed as LLC president and Neuralink Corp listed as a member, built on property that sits in a FEMA-designated flood zone directly adjacent to the Colorado River — the same area that flooded during the Memorial Day floods of 2018, causing extensive damage throughout Travis County.
Following the Money
There’s being prepared for future growth, making smart bets on where your technology might go, building infrastructure ahead of demand. And then there’s whatever this is — facilities at a scale that suggests plans far beyond what’s being communicated publicly, being built before the technology has been proven to work reliably over any meaningful timeframe, before the regulatory pathway is even clear. When you’re constructing this kind of infrastructure, you’re not planning for gradual clinical validation. You’re planning for something much bigger.
So the questions I’m left with are straightforward: What’s actually happening at 2200 Caldwell Lane? And what’s about to happen in San Francisco?
If you have information about Neuralink’s operations, facilities, or clinical practices, I want to hear from you. All communications can be confidential, sources protected.
Sources Cited
Property & Real Estate Records
Homes.com - Property listing for 2200 Caldwell Lane, Del Valle, TX: https://www.homes.com/property/2200-caldwell-ln-del-valle-tx/8fz7jvj1hezde/
Travis County Appraisal District - Property tax records for 2200 Caldwell Lane:
Corporate & Business Records
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts - River Bottoms Ranch LLC (Tax ID 32077356775): https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/franchise/account-status/search/32077356775
Texas Secretary of State - Business entity search: https://www.sos.state.tx.us/corp/sosda/index.shtml
Excession LLC - Official website: https://excession.llc/
Construction & Permitting
Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation - Project ATX1 permit (TABS2024022676): https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/TABS/Search/Print/TABS2024022676
Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation - Additional project filing (TABS2024016698): https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/TABS/Search/Project/TABS2024016698
Employment & Hiring
Indeed - Neuralink job postings (OR Specialist, Neurosurgeon Resident): https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Neuralink/jobs
Regulatory & Clinical Trial Information
ClinicalTrials.gov - Neuralink PRIME study registry
U.S. Food and Drug Administration - Investigational Device Exemption regulations: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/
U.S. Department of Agriculture - Animal Welfare Act and IACUC standards: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal-welfare
News & Reporting
Tesla North, “Elon Musk’s Neuralink Plans Expansion to 37 Acres Near Giga Texas” (September 2022): https://teslanorth.com/2022/09/10/elon-musks-neuralink-plans-expansion-to-37-acres-near-giga-texas/
Tesmanian, “A Group Associated with Elon Musk Purchased Up to 620 Acres Near Tesla Giga Texas”: https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/a-group-associated-with-elon-musk-purchased-up-to-620-acres-across-the-colorado-river-near-tesla-giga-texas
Environmental & Geographic Data
Federal Emergency Management Agency - Flood zone maps for Travis County: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality - Permit database: https://www.tceq.texas.gov/
The Drey Dossier is an independent investigative journalism project supported by readers. If you value this kind of accountability reporting, please consider subscribing.
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.
