Elon Musk’s brain is not like most people’s. When he is not satisfied with the way something works, he reinvents it: cars, rockets – and now, cities. This week, he announced plans for a new South Texas city called Starbase.
The idea is to take over the unincorporated seaside village of Boca Chica, a kind of mini-Texan Cape Canaveral, about 355 miles from Austin, where its SpaceX already has a massive missile facility. It’s all part of his mission to bring people to Mars in this decade. (Even though one of the Starship missile prototypes caught fire this week during a test flight, an unforeseen part of the troubleshooting.)
Now he uses his own superpower, the intellect, to give people a chance to be as smart as he is. He can change his mind forever with Neuralink, which aims to use implanted brain chips to improve the human body – and help us compete with AI.
Then there are other side agitations of its own, such as the HyperLoop transport network – a kind of high-speed rail, but with pressure capsules – being designed by its boring company or its Starlink satellite system.
There is no doubt about Musk’s intelligence, curiosity or even his bandwidth to change the world. But as his oversized ego and Twitter explosions get him in trouble, some skeptics wonder if he’s just a crazy billionaire ego: superhero or supervillain?
“There’s definitely something superhuman or even alien in his brain,” pioneer player and engineer Garry Kitchen told The Post.
“Something happens as if it’s pulling on all the cylinders all the time, like some kind of mutation or DNA failure. The same could be said of Einstein, who rewrote physics at the age of 22. But what makes Musk different is the way he sees no boundaries and is not afraid. And he doesn’t care if people think he’s crazy. That makes him unique. ”
As his future “Starbase” and its explosive rocket caught the eye this week, microchipped pigs with names such as Gertrude, Barbara, Cleo and Dorothy were running on treadmills when the San Francisco brain implant started. In fact, pigs and at least one monkey are test drivers, as Musk’s team develops high-bandwidth interfaces to connect people and computers.
Formed in 2016, Neuralink is one of Musk’s most secretive branches. The immediate goals of the effort are to treat traumatic brain injuries. Musk says paralyzed people who have a Neuralink electronic chip installed in their skulls, for example, could walk again.
“Think of it as a small-skinned Fitbit,” he said in a rare August Neuralink video about the implant, which is the size of a large coin. “You can get a connection in an hour without general anesthesia and you can leave the hospital on the same day. You need an excellent device and a great robot to insert electrodes and perform surgery. ”
Musk said people are “already cyborgs” because of access to smartphones and computers. Neuralink, he says, will close this gap and prepare us for the future. Adding a digital layer to the limbic system and the brain’s cortex may be humanity’s only hope of matching the exponential and possibly sinister growth of artificial intelligence. Otherwise, Musk said, people could drop to “domestic cats.”
The MIT Technology Review has disappointed Neuralink’s work so far with “theater of neuroscience” and exaggeration.
But Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering and a futurist credited with the idea of ”uniqueness,” says cars could outperform humans by 2030, and time is of the essence for companies like Neuralink to help people keep up.
“To interact directly with the brain, we need more speed,” Kurzweil told The Post. “When we reach the 2030s, we will have neural network technologies at Google that go far beyond what is feasible today. They will. . . surpasses human intelligence. For this to be something that makes people smarter than competing with people, we need the ability to interact with our neocortex. But this must be done at a rapid pace, much faster than we can do now. ”
Musk bought the Neuralink name in 2017 from neurologist Randolph Nudo and Pedram Mohseni, an electrical engineer and professor at Case Western Reserve, after the two branded it in 2015 for their own brain-tech start-up.
“I’m rooting for him,” Nudo told the Post. “He had the money to form a great team of experts 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 a 32-year-old Duke University graduate and biomedical expert, Max Hodak, who describes himself as “a general information living in San Francisco.”
Like much of the Musk Empire, Neuralink is in the process of moving from Silicon Valley to Texas – which has no personal income tax, while California has the largest in the nation. Musk, who is worth $ 199.9 billion and the richest person in the world, moved to Austin himself last year, and SpaceX would build another factory in that city.
Neuralink will not answer questions from the media. Instead, the company revealed some of its inner workings in some clean videos and information sources from Musk.
Last month, he said human studies on the brain chip could begin this year. In an interview on the social network Clubhouse, Musk described a chipped monkey at Neuralink labs that can play video games using only its mind.
Such implants can be inductively charged like a watch or a phone – no problems, no wires – Musk said. They can be inserted so that there is no visible bleeding or neuronal damage. After analyzing a pig test subject named Dorothy, Musk argued that an implant could be removed and left out or reintroduced without any apparent negative effects.
In what he acknowledged, it sounds like a “Black Mirror” episode, Musk said people can store, save and play back their memories as a backup with the chip – and even download them to a new body or a robot. He hopes the technology will benefit or cure Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s patients.
When Musk unveiled his big new idea for brain technology in 2016, he described it as “neural lace.” It was the kind of scientific intelligence that people came to expect from Musk – despite his flaws and eccentricities and the history of strange tweets.
Musk landed in court in 2019, when lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission complained that the tweets he made about his car company Tesla – including a reference to the “420” pot culture – would could “move 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, called him ” pedo type ”. Musk backed Kanye West’s presidential bid in 2020, only to back down.
But a longtime friend says Musk is – more than anything – a working bastard who barely sleeps because he wants to do things.
“Elon Musk could be a fictional character,” Robert Zubrin, the 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 of people like Robert Heinlein or Allen Steele who wrote about rich businessmen recruited by visionaries. ”
Two other ultra-rich magnets, Texas banker Andrew Beal and telecommunications entrepreneur Walt Anderson, tried their hand at the private missile business and failed. Musk’s longtime rival, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, has launched his own, called Blue Origin, but Zubrin says his money is on Musk.
“If Bezos wants to compete with Musk, he will have to get out of the hot tub,” Zubrin said. “Musk is much tougher.”
The muscle was perfected in a South African childhood that he said was “like a misfortune.”
He was born in Pretoria, and his parents, Maye Musk, a dietitian 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 such a terrible human being,” Musk said in 2017. “You have no idea. My father will have a carefully thought out evil plan … Almost every crime you can think of has done it. ”
Musk left South Africa for Canada, in his mother’s hometown, in 1989, with little money, collapsing on the couches of relatives in Saskatchewan. He earned the first millions with a web software startup called Zip2 and later founded the company that became PayPal.
Musk was mocked and underestimated by industry experts he tried to disrupt – just to show them, like when he beat NASA to create a reusable spacecraft or made Tesla the world’s most valuable car company last year, with a valuation of $ 208 billion.
Even this week’s SpaceX rocket explosion is just part of the way Musk is fast tracking his entire technology.
“Musk’s methodology has much more in common with the first pioneers of flight,” Zubrin said.
“Elon builds them, collapses them, realizes what went wrong and tries again. Due to his desire to fail, he succeeds much faster. NASA, on the other hand, has been working on something similar to this since about 1988. All I’ve been doing is analyzing and analyzing for decades. ”
Several scientists and engineers interviewed by The Post about Musk said they envy his fearlessness even more than his intellectual power.
For example, he first went to Moscow almost on a whim in 2000 to try to buy missiles (a Russian allegedly spat in front of Musk). He then decided to build his own missiles and launched his first Falcon 1 in 2006 from a small desert island in the Pacific, called Kwajalein Island – one of Musk’s lesser-known Jules Verne mines.
Author Eric Berger, who spent time with Musk at the SpaceX plantation in Hawthorne, California, and flew with him to Boca Chica on 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 Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX,” appeared on March 2.
“But Musk is absolutely brilliant. This is someone who thinks in another plane. ”
To all of Musk’s alien intellect, Berger said he was surprised at how normal Musk seemed to his children. Despite 120 hours of work and insomnia, Musk manages to see his six boys a week. (Five sons 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,” Berger said. “But he also has his children with him quite regularly. When he was with them, he seemed like a normal father. And they seemed to like him a lot. He was certainly a father to them, not the great Elon Musk. “