Elon Musk has confirmed that his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, has successfully implanted its device in a third human patient. Musk made this announcement during an interview with Stagwell‘s CEO Mark Penn at CES 2025, which was live-streamed on social media platform X (earlier Twitter). He added that his brain chip startup is planning 20 to 30 more procedures in 2025 (Cue: 13:15).
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What Musk said about Neuralink’s third human implant
During the interview, when Penn asked Musk about “brain-to-technology communication”, he said: “We’ve got now three humans with Neuralinks implanted and they’re working well. We upgraded the devices, they’ll have more electrodes, basically higher bandwidth, longer battery life and everything. So, expect 20 or 30 patients this year with the upgraded Neuralink devices.”
What Musk said about Neuralink’s roadmap
“With our first product, we’re trying to enable people who have lost their brain-body connection. So, if they are tetraplegic, paraplegic or, as you can imagine say Stephen Hawking. If Stephen Hawking could communicate as fast or even faster than a normal human, that would be transformational. Being able to read the motor cortex of the brain. If you think about moving your hand, it will move the cursor on the screen. And it enables people to control their computer or their phone just by thinking. Then our next part will be Blindsight devices where even if somebody has lost both eyes or has lost the optic nerve, we can interface directly with the visual cortex in the brain and enable them to see. We already have that working in monkeys,” Musk added.
“We think if you have a second Neuralink device, that is past the point where the spinal damage occurred. We can transmit the signals from the brain past where essentially the wires are broken and enable someone to walk again. I’m confident that that is physically possible. In the long term goal for Neuralink is to be able to improve the bandwidth. So, right now, when we’re speaking our bandwidth and this per second is quite low and the sustained bandwidth of a human is less than one bit per second over 24 hours,” he further explained.
