Elon Musk’s brain is not like most people. When he is not satisfied with how something works, he reinvents it: cars, rockets – and now, cities. This week, he announced that he is planning a new city in southern Texas called “Starbase”.
The idea is to take control of the unincorporated coastal village of Boca Chica, a kind of mini Texan Cape Canaveral about 355 miles from Austin, where your SpaceX already has a giant rocket facility. It is all part of your mission to bring humans to Mars in this decade. (Even though, this week, one of the starship’s rocket prototypes caught fire during a test flight, an unexpected part of solving the problems.)
Now he is using his own superpower, his intellect, to give humans a chance to be as smart as he is. It can change our minds forever with Neuralink, which aims to use implanted brain chips to improve the human body – and help us compete with AI.
Then there are its movements on the other side, like the HyperLoop transport network – a kind of high-speed train, but with pressurized capsules – being designed by its Boring Company, or its Starlink satellite system.
There is no doubt about Musk’s intelligence, or curiosity, or even his bandwidth to change the world. But as his huge ego and Twitter outbursts get him into trouble, some skeptics wonder if he is just an ego-crazy billionaire: superhero or supervillain?
“There is definitely something superhuman or even strange in your brain,” pioneer player and engineer Garry Kitchen told The Post.
“Something is happening as if it is firing at all cylinders all the time, like some kind of mutation or malfunction of DNA. The same could be said of Einstein, who rewrote physics at age 22. But what makes Musk different is that he sees no limits and is not afraid. And he doesn’t care if people think he’s crazy. This is what makes it unique. “
While his future “Starbase” and his exploding rocket drew attention this week, microchipped pigs with names like Gertrude, Barbara, Cleo and Dorothy were walking on treadmills at their brain implant startup in San Francisco. Pigs, and at least one monkey, are the test pilots, in fact, as Musk’s team develops high-bandwidth interfaces to connect humans and computers.
Formed in 2016, Neuralink is one of Musk’s most secret branches. The immediate objectives of the venture are to treat traumatic brain injuries. Musk says that paralyzed people who have Neuralink’s electronic brain chip installed in their skulls, for example, can walk again.
“Think of it as a Fitbit on your skull with tiny threads,” he said in a rare video from Neuralink headquarters in August about the implant, which is the size of a large coin. “You get a link in an hour without general anesthesia and leave the hospital on the same day. You need a great device and a great robot to place the electrodes and perform surgery. “
Musk said that humans “are already cyborgs” because of access to smartphones and computers. Neuralink, he says, will close that gap and prepare us for the future. Adding a digital layer to the limbic system and brain cortex may be humanity’s only hope of matching the exponential and possibly sinister rise of artificial intelligence. Otherwise, Musk said, humans can fall to the level of “domestic cats”.
The MIT Technology Review considered Neuralink’s work a “theater of neuroscience” and a lot of exaggeration.
But Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google and a futurist credited with the idea of ”uniqueness”, says machines can surpass humans in intelligence by 2030 and time is essential for companies like Neuralink to help humans stay up to date.
“To interact directly with the brain, we need more speed,” Kurzweil told The Post. “When we get to the 2030s, we’ll have neural network technologies at Google that go well beyond what’s feasible today. Those will. . . exceed human intelligence. For this to be something that makes humans smarter, instead of just competing with humans, we need to have the ability to interact with our neocortex. But it has to be done at a fast speed, much faster than we can do now. “
Musk bought the name Neuralink in 2017 from neuroscientist Randolph Nudo and Pedram Mohseni, electrical engineer and professor at Case Western Reserve, after the two registered him in 2015 for their own brain technology startup.
“I’m rooting for him,” Nudo told the Post. “He had the money to assemble an excellent team of specialists in brain-machine interfaces and I hope that the technology he develops will help us all.”
Neuralink’s day-to-day operations are led by Max Hodak, a Duke University graduate and 32-year-old biomedicine specialist, who describes himself as “an intelligence general living in San Francisco”.
Like much of the Musk empire, Neuralink is moving from Silicon Valley to Texas – which has no personal income tax, while California has the highest in the country. Musk, who is worth $ 199.9 billion and is the richest person in the world, moved to Austin last year and SpaceX is building another factory in that city.
Neuralink does not answer questions from the media. Instead, the company has revealed some of its in-house work in some curated videos and jets of information from Musk.
Last month, he said that human testing of the brain chip could begin this year. In an interview on the social network Clubhouse, Musk described a chipped monkey in Neuralink’s labs who is able to play video games using only his mind.
These implants can be charged inductively like a watch or phone – perfectly, without wires – said Musk. They can be inserted in such a way that there is no noticeable bleeding or neural damage. After analyzing a guinea pig, called Dorothy, Musk said that an implant could be removed and left out or reinserted without apparent harmful effects.
In what he admitted sounded like an episode of “Black Mirror”, Musk said that humans could store, save and repeat their memories as a backup with the chip – and even download them into a new body or robot. He hopes the technology will benefit or cure Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s patients.
When Musk first unveiled his big new idea for brain technology in 2016, he described it as “neural income”. It was the kind of science fiction information that the world expects from Musk – despite its flaws, eccentricities and strange tweeting history.
Musk was brought to court in 2019 in 2019, when lawyers from the Securities and Exchange Commission complained that tweets he made about his Tesla car company – including a reference to “420 marijuana culture” – could “move the markets”. Also in 2019, a British cave explorer who helped rescue a dozen boys and a football coach from a flooded cave in Thailand sued Musk for defamation after Musk, in a tweet, labeled him a “pedo guy”. Musk supported the Kanye West presidential race in 2020, only to step back.
But a longtime friend said that Musk is – more than anything – a workaholic nerd who barely sleeps because he wants to do things.
“Elon Musk could be a fictional character,” Robert Zubrin, head of the Mars Society who has known Musk for 20 years, told the Post. “It was anticipated in science fiction. Just read the old novels by people like Robert Heinlein or Allen Steele, who wrote about wealthy entrepreneurs recruited by visionaries ”.
Two other ultra-wealthy tycoons, Texas banker Andrew Beal and telecommunications entrepreneur Walt Anderson, tried their luck in the private rocket business and went bankrupt. Musk’s longtime rival, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, has launched his own, called Blue Origin, but Zubrin says his money is in Musk.
“If Bezos wants to compete with Musk, he will have to get out of the hot tub,” said Zubrin. “Musk is much more resistant.”
Musk’s courage was enhanced in a South African childhood that he said was “like misery”.
He was born in Pretoria and his parents, Maye Musk, a nutritionist and model, and Errol Musk, a wealthy engineer, divorced when he was young. He and his brother, Kimbal, chose to live with their father.
“He was a terrible human being,” said Musk in 2017. “You have no idea. My father will have a carefully designed plan of evil … Almost every crime you can imagine, he committed. “
Musk left South Africa and went to his mother’s homeland, Canada, in 1989, with little money, falling on the sofas of relatives in Saskatchewan. He made his first million with a web software startup called Zip2 and later founded the company that became PayPal.
Musk was ridiculed and underestimated by experts in the industries he tried to stop – just to show them, such as when he defeated NASA in creating a reusable space vehicle or made Tesla the most valuable car company in the world last year, with a valuation of US $ 208 billion.
Even the SpaceX rocket explosion this week is just part of how Musk accelerates all of his technology.
“Musk’s methodology has a lot more in common with the pioneers of flight,” said Zubrin.
“Elon builds them, breaks them, finds out what went wrong and tries again. Because of his willingness to fail, he is succeeding much faster. NASA, on the other hand, has been working on something similar since about 1988. All they do is analyze and analyze for decades ”.
Several scientists and engineers interviewed by The Post about Musk said they envied his courage even more than his intelligence.
For example, he went to Moscow almost on a whim in 2000 to try to buy rockets (a Russian would have spit in Musk’s face). So he decided to build his own rockets and launched his first Falcon 1 in 2006 on a small desert island in the Pacific called Kwajalein Island – one of Musk’s lesser-known Jules Verne feats.
Author Eric Berger, who spent time with Musk at the SpaceX plant in Hawthorne, California, and flew with him to Boca Chica in his private jet, told The Post that Musk’s brain is unusual.
“I spoke to Stephen Hawking four different times,” said Berger, whose book, “Liftoff: Elon Musk and the first desperate days that SpaceX launched,” was released on March 2.
“But Musk is absolutely brilliant. This is someone who is thinking of a different plan. “
Despite all of Musk’s alien intelligence, Berger said he was impressed by how normal Musk looked with his children. Despite reports of 120-hour workweeks and insomnia, Musk is able to see his six boys a week. (Five children are with his first wife, Justine Musk, while the youngest, X Æ A-Xii, was born to Musk and singer Grimes in 2020.)
“He works incredibly hard,” said Berger. “But he also has his children with him quite regularly. When he was with them, he looked like a normal father. And they seemed to like him very much. He was definitely the father to them, not the great Elon Musk. “