Would You Let Elon Musk Into Your Mind? The Truth Behind Neuralink’s Brain Chips
Elon Musk doesn’t just want to send rockets to Mars or have a fleet of self-driving cars, he also wants to put chips in people’s heads.
By 2026, Neuralink says a thousand of these little chips could be ticking away under human skulls. That’s their goal anyway.
The surgery would take about ten minutes, and the cost would be about the same as an Apple Watch.
Sounds simple, right? A little too simple maybe?
I think that’s because what he’s really selling isn’t just a fancy new gadget, it’s a new way of being human.
So…What Is Neuralink, Anyway?
If you don’t follow tech stuff as obsessively as I do (good for you, don’t, it’ll give you headaches), Neuralink is Musk’s latest obsession, a brain-computer interface. It’s basically a chip, smaller than a coin, that can read your neural signals and send them, I don’t know, somewhere else.
It’s sort of like a way to make your thoughts talk to machines. The possibilities are endless and alien sounding: move a prosthetic arm just by thinking, restore sight to the blind, help someone paralyzed walk again, silence seizures before they even start, ease depression by rewiring the brain’s own circuits, replay memories like a video file.
Not sure about you, but to me it reads like Jesus Christ but tech-based. Or like one of those crazy people who tour around the world claiming they can heal everyone they touch. Sorry Jesus for putting you in the same paragraph as those people, I didn’t mean anything by it.
As if that wasn’t enough, there are the even wilder promises being thrown around the interwebs like download a new language in seconds, or connect your mind directly to the internet!
At its heart, Neuralink isn’t just about fixing broken things, it’s about making us “upgradable.” Turning biology into software and making the human mind play nice with AI.
Brains, But Bargain-Priced
Only Elon Musk would try to sell brain surgery the way Apple sells wrist candy.
Neuralink’s target price isn’t some unreachable six-figure medical bill, no, it’s about $1,000…the cost of a new iPhone or a shiny Apple Watch Ultra.
That’s intentional.
Call it marketing genius or just classic Musk showmanship, but price something like a gadget and suddenly it feels like one.
A brain chip stops sounding like surgery and starts sounding like an accessory.
Something you show off, something you upgrade when the next version drops, not potentially life (or quality of life) altering surgery.
But here’s the catch I feel like I need to mention because a lot of people are glossing over it online, this isn’t a wearable. You can’t put it back in the box when you’re done.
This is your brain.
The very thing that makes you…you.
Neuralink wants to make it seem totally normal, a ten-minute procedure from a perfectly steady robot hand to insert a tiny coin-sized chip. But no matter how easy they say it is, it’s hard not to feel the tingle of sci-fi running up your spine.
When brain surgery starts looking like a tech launch, you have to wonder are we upgrading our lives, or auctioning off the last private space we have left?
The Quickest Surgery You’ll Ever Have
Neuralink doesn’t picture white coats or hospital beds, they picture a literal robot.
A sleek machine that opens your skull and slides a chip into place. The promise is ten minutes, no anesthesia, and no overnight stay. You’d be home before your dinner reservation, except now you’d have a computer living in your brain.
Sounds efficient and creepy in a way I can’t get behind.
This isn’t like replacing a phone battery or installing a new screen protector, people. This is the seat of your consciousness, you know, the place where memory, identity, and personality all hide. What happens if the robot slips? Or if the chip fails? Or if Neuralink pushes a firmware update that goes sideways?
The risks may be statistically small (they claim), but small isn’t zero. Someone always wins the lottery, whether it’s a good one or a bad one. A glitch in your phone is annoying, but a glitch in your mind is something else entirely.
And then there’s informed consent, which is easy to say out loud, but harder to guarantee when early adopters are desperate: the blind hoping to see, the paralyzed hoping to walk. Hope can blur that fine print. Who among us wouldn’t volunteer for a surgery with the hope of getting better? That’s not even fair. I remember after my trauma before I did EMDR they warned me it would change the way my mind worked forever, but I was coming two months off watching someone shoot themselves in the head in front of me, and can say now I was in no reasonable place to make that decision. Are we just turning those desperate for solutions into our human test subjects?
This is not a cosmetic upgrade in any way, it isn’t like choosing a shinier phone with the better camera lense. It’s neural invasion, dressed up in promises so sweet they could give you a cavity.
The potential is huge, yes, I get that. But so is the gamble.
Healing the Brain vs. Hacking It
There’s a big difference between fixing what’s broken and rewriting what works fine on its own.
On the one hand, Neuralink could change medicine forever, and I’m not trying to downplay that at all. A paralyzed person typing with thought alone or someone with ALS finding their voice again is a damn miracle. A patient with Parkinson’s controlling their body, not the other way around is what all of the researchers in the world are trying to do. These are the stories that make people lean in with hope.
But Musk’s ambitions don’t stop at healing, and why would they? He’s the guy who’s trying to take us to Mars, why wouldn’t he be pushing the human body to it’s limits, then rewriting the limits again? He talks about “merging with AI”, as if the only way to survive the future is to blend into it and become our own cyborgs. In his vision of tomorrow, you don’t just use technology. You are the technology.
Summon your car with your thoughts or compose a symphony without touching a key. Translate a language without ever opening a book or that Google Translate app I’m so fond of. It sounds dazzling and magical. It also sounds like the start of a new race.
If you can upgrade your brain, will you have to, just to keep up? What happens when thinking becomes a competitive sport?
Where AI and Neuralink Collide
Let’s not forget Musk also launched Grok 3.5 through xAI…a chatbot meant to outwit, outwork, and outsnark ChatGPT. Grok already pulls real-time data from X (formerly Twitter), and its ambitions are huge. Now imagine Neuralink paired with Grok. A mind connected not just to a chip, but to a live AI assistant that knows your preferences, your tendencies, or even your moods.
Are we building tools to help humans, or turning humans into tools? Because when the same man wants to connect your brain to AI but he owns the AI…it’s worth pausing for just a moment to think about it.
Not to mention, a bunch of ChatGPT users are already experiencing hallucinations and delusions, so what’s next?
What if someone hacks your brain? Not your phone, not your emails, but like your actual thoughts. If Neuralink connects the mind to a device, then the mind becomes vulnerable in the same way every single device is. It could be manipulated or used in surveillance.
We already laugh about how ads follow us after we say something near our phones (still creepy, not funny). Now imagine that level of targeting with direct access to your neural signals. The ad doesn’t just know you want coffee, it knows you craved it before you did. Or did it manufactor the craving for you? The chicken, the egg? What came first? Can you prove it? Who owns the data in your brain then, you, or the chip?
So what’s the defense, new privacy laws? A mental firewall? Or do we just shrug and call it the cost of progress, the way we did with social media? The way we still do every day when we open Instagram and Facebook and fire off our dopamine centers until real life depresses us.
Because if we’ve learned anything from Big Tech, it’s this: when the product is free, you are the product.
1,000 Chips by 2026
Neuralink isn’t speaking in decades, they’re talking in years right now. By 2026, Musk says a thousand people could already be living with brain chips. The first human trials have already begun. A handful of patients have chips in their skulls, moving cursors across screens with nothing but thought. It’s ambitious, it’s audacious, and it’s happening insanely fast.
If it works, this could be the start of the brain–computer revolution. A new era where chips heal disease, restore movement, and even change what it means to be human.
But there’s another path, one where implants aren’t just medicine, but status.
The “upgraded” and the “unplugged.” The rich racing ahead while everyone else falls behind.
Will brain chips become the next iPhone? A shiny upgrade every two years, with the pressure to stay current stitched right into our skulls? Will there be a monthly subscription that increases year after year because the damn thing is in your head already and you have no other option but to keep paying for it?
What Makes Us Human?
If I haven’t gone too far at this point, and you’re still here, thank you for listening to my TedTalk. At the center of it all is the question no chip can answer, and it’s because we’re human and it isn’t.
If memories live on a hard drive are they still ours? If choices are nudged by algorithms, are they still choices?
Our feelings are already manipulated by social media and the news and the teachers at school and our coworkers who spend hours a day with us, but this feels different somehow.
Every new tool changes us from stone blades to smartphones, we’ve always merged with what we build. But when the tool isn’t in our hands anymore, but in our heads does it change it?
And whoever holds the next neural upgrade…scientist, company, or billionaire…is holding more than circuits. They’re holding us.
If you’re not quite ready for a brain chip but still want to boost your brain power, try Onnit Alpha Brain. It's a nootropic supplement with some decent clinical backing…and no surgery required.
Reads You Might Enjoy:
Digital Synesthesia: When AI Starts to Sense the World Like We Do
Trifluoroacetic Acid: The New Acid Rain We Didn’t See Coming
Gillbert the Robot Fish: Filtering Ocean Plastic One Bite at a Time
Humans May Have Untapped Hibernation Genes — And Superpowers
Sources:
“About Neuralink.” Neuralink, Neuralink Corp., 2025, https://neuralink.com.
Conger, Kate. “Elon Musk’s Neuralink Gets FDA Approval for Human Clinical Trials.” The New York Times, 25 May 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/technology/elon-musk-neuralink-fda-approval.html.
Metz, Cade. “The Brain Implant That Musk Says Could Help the Blind See.” The New York Times, 30 Nov. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/technology/elon-musk-neuralink.html.
Reardon, Sara. “Neuralink: The Truth about Elon Musk’s Brain Chip.” Nature, vol. 618, no. 7964, 2023, pp. 442–444.
Vincent, James. “Elon Musk’s Neuralink and the Ethics of Brain-Computer Interfaces.” The Verge, 30 Aug. 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/elon-musk-neuralink-ethics.
