Elon Musk’s brain is not like most people’s. If he’s not happy with how something works, he finds out again: cars, rockets – and now cities. This week, he announced that he was planning a new city in southern Texas called “Starbase.”
The idea is to take the unoccupied coastal town of Boca Chica, a kind of mini-Texan Cape Canaveral, about 355 kilometers from Austin, where its SpaceX already has a massive rocket facility. It’s all part of his mission to bring people to Mars in this decade. (Even though this week one of the prototypes of the Starship rockets would go up in flames during a test flight, it is an unexpected part of the effects of the kinks.)
Now he uses his own superpower, his intellect, to give people the chance to be as smart as he is. He 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 other pressures, such as the HyperLoop transport network – such as a high-speed rail, but with capsules under pressure – designed by its Boring Company or its Starlink satellite system.
Musk’s intelligence, or curiosity or even his bandwidth to change the world, undoubtedly suffers. But because his exaggerated ego and Twitter explosions get him in trouble, some skeptics wonder if he’s just a genuinely crazy billionaire: superhero or supervillain?
“There’s definitely something superhuman or even strange about his brain,” groundbreaking gamer and engineer Garry Kitchen told The Post.
‘Something happens like it’s shooting on all cylinders all the time, like some kind of mutation or DNA malfunction. The same can be said of Einstein who rewrote physics at the age of 22. But what makes Musk different is how he sees no limits and has no fear. And he does not care if people think he is crazy. This is what makes him one of a kind. ”
While his future “Starbase” and his exploding rocket caught attention this week, pigs with names like Gertrude, Barbara, Cleo and Dorothy walked with careers on his brain implant in San Francisco. The pigs, and at least one monkey, are the test pilots, as Musk’s team develops high-bandwidth interfaces to connect humans and computers.
Neuralink, formed in 2016, is one of Musk’s more mysterious auctioneers. The immediate goals of the effort are to treat traumatic brain injuries. Musk says paralyzed people who have Neuralink’s electronic brain chip installed in their skulls, for example, could possibly walk again.
“Think of it as Fitbit in your skull with small wires,” he said in a rare video from Neuralink’s headquarters in August about the implant, which is the size of a large coin. ‘You can get a call within an hour without general anesthesia and leave the hospital the same day. You need an amazing device and an amazing robot that inserts the electrode and does surgery. ‘
Musk said people are “already cyborgs” because of access to smartphones and computers. Neuralink, he says, will close the gap and prepare us for the future. The addition of a digital layer to the limbic system and cortex of the brain is perhaps the only hope of mankind to adapt to the exponential and possibly sinister rise of artificial intelligence. Otherwise, Musk says, people could drop to the level of ‘domestic cats’.
The MIT Technology Review has so far repelled Neuralink’s work as a ‘neuroscience theater’ and suffered from hype.
But Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google and a futurist attributed to the idea of ”the singularity”, says that machines could surpass humans in intelligence by 2030 and that time is of the utmost importance for companies like Neuralink around humans to help keep up.
“To communicate directly with the brain, we need more speed,” Kurzweil told The Post. ‘When we get into the 2030s, we’ll have neurological networking technologies at Google that go far beyond what is possible today. It will. . . exceeds human intelligence. To make it something that makes people smarter rather than just competing with people, we need the ability to communicate with our neocortex. But it needs to be done quickly, much bigger than we can do now. ”
Musk bought the Neuralink name in 2017 from neuroscientist 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 technology brand.
“I root for him,” Nudo told the Post. “He had the money to put together an excellent team of brain machine interfaces experts, and I hope the technology he develops will help us all.”
Neuralink’s day-to-day operations are run by a 32-year-old Duke University graduate and biomedical expert, Max Hodak, who describes himself as a general intelligence 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 the richest person in the world, moved to Austin himself last year and SpaceX is reportedly building a factory in the city.
Neuralink will not answer questions from the media. Instead, the company revealed some of its inner workings in some composite videos and tracks from intel from Musk.
Last month, he said human trials of the brain chip could begin this year. In an interview on the social network Clubhouse, Musk described a monkey in the Neuralink labs who is capable of playing video games with just his mind.
Such implants can be inductively charged like a watch or telephone – seamlessly, no wires – Musk said. They can be inserted so that there is no bleeding or noticeable neural damage. After analyzing one subject, named Dorothy, Musk claimed that an implant could be removed and removed or re-placed without having an apparent effect.
In what he acknowledged sounded like a ‘Black Mirror’ episode, Musk said humans could store, store and replay their memories as a backup with the chip – even in a new body or robot. can download. He hopes the technology will benefit or cure patients with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
When Musk first unveiled his big new idea for brain technology in 2016, he described it as a ‘neural side’. It was the kind of scientific intelligence that Musk’s world expected – despite its flaws and eccentricity and the history of strange tweeting.
Musk ended up in court in 2019 when lawyers from the Securities and Exchange Commission complained about the tweets he made about his car company Tesla – including a reference to the ‘420’ pot culture – ‘could move markets’. Also in 2019, a British cave explorer who helped rescue a dozen boys and a football coach from a flooded Thailand cave sued Musk for libel after Musk described him as a pedo boy in a tweet. Musk supported Kanye West’s presidential election in 2020, only to return.
But a longtime friend says Musk is – more than anything – a workaholic geek who barely sleeps because he wants to do things.
“Elon Musk can be a fictional character,” Robert Zubrin, the head of the Mars Society who has known Musk for 20 years, told The Post. ‘He was expected 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 magnates, Texas banker Andrew Beal and telecommunications entrepreneur Walt Anderson, tried their hand at the private rocket industry and failed. Musk’s longtime rival, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, has introduced his own name 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 whirlpool,” Zubrin said. “Musk is much tougher.”
Musk’s gravel was honed in a South African childhood that he said was ‘like misery’.
He was born in Pretoria, and his parents, Maye Musk, a dietitian and model, and Errol Musk, a wealthy engineer, were divorced when he was young. He and his brother, Kimbal, chose to live with their father.
“He was such a terrible person,” Musk said in 2017. “You have no idea. My dad will have a well thought out plan of evil … He’s done almost every crime you can think of. ‘
Musk left South Africa in 1989 with little money for his native Canada, with little money, and crashed on relatives’ couches in Saskatchewan. He earned his first millions with a web software startup called Zip2 and later founded the company that became PayPal.
Musk was mocked and underestimated by experts in the industries he tried to disrupt – just to show up, like when he beat NASA to create a reusable spacecraft or made Tesla the most valuable automotive company in the world last year with a valuation of $ 208 billion.
Even the SpaceX’s rocket blast this week is just part of how Musk is tracking all of its technology.
“Musk’s methodology had much more in common with the early pioneers of flight,” Zubrin said.
Elon builds them, crushes them, finds out what went wrong and tries again. Because of his willingness to fail, he succeeds 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 fearlessness even more than his brainpower.
For example, he almost went to Moscow for the first time in 2000 to buy rockets (one Russian apparently spat in Musk’s face). Then he decided to build his own rockets and launched his first Falcon 1 in 2006 on a small desert island in the Pacific Ocean called Kwajalein Island – one of the lesser known Jules Verne species of Musk.
Writer Eric Berger, who spent time with Musk in SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, and flew with him to Boca Chica on his private plane, told The Post that Musk’s brain is unusual.
“I spoke to Stephen Hawking four different times,” Berger said. His book, “Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That SpaceX,” appeared on March 2nd.
‘But Musk is absolutely brilliant. This is someone who thinks on a different level. ”
For all of Musk’s alien intellect, Berger said he was struck by how normal Musk looks with his children. Despite reported 120-week workweek and insomnia attacks, Musk manages to see his six sons weekly. (Five sons are with his first wife, Justine Musk, while the youngest, X Æ A-Xii, was born in 2020 for Musk and singer Grimes.)
“He works incredibly hard,” Berger said. ‘But he also has his children with him fairly often. When he was with them, he looked like a normal father. And they seem to like him a lot. He was definitely the father to them, not the great Elon Musk. ‘