First person to get Elon Musk’s experimental brain chip, reveals his identity

quote:

---

18 months after becoming the first human implanted with Elon Musk’s brain chip, Neuralink ‘Participant 1’ Noland Arbaugh says his whole life has changed

It was February 2024 when Noland Arbaugh, the first person to get Elon Musk’s experimental brain chip, rolled across the stage in a wheelchair during a Neuralink “all hands” meeting, revealing his identity for the first time.

The room, filled with Neuralink employees, erupted in applause as Arbaugh—who dislocated two of his vertebrae in a swimming accident in 2016 and has since lost sensation and movement below his shoulders—smiled ear-to-ear in his chair, a red Texas A&M hat planted on his head. He grinned as he began to speak: “Hello, humans.”

About a month before that town hall, Arbaugh had undergone surgery at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, about 2.5 hours from his home in Yuma, to get an experimental chip embedded into his brain which Neuralink had been working on and testing on animals for the past nine years. Arbaugh was anesthetized and, in a surgery that lasted just under two hours, a Neuralink-made robotic surgery device implanted the chip and connected tiny threads with more than 1,000 electrodes to the neurons in his brain. Now the device can measure electrical activity, process signals, then translate those signals into commands to a digital device. In layman’s speak, the BCI , or brain-computer interface, allows Arbaugh to control a computer with his mind. As a result, Arbaugh can do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body.

The first day that Arbaugh used his device, he beat the 2017 world record for speed and precision in BCI cursor control. “It was very, very easy to learn how to use,” he tells me in an interview.

When Arbaugh became Participant 1—or “P1” as he is often referred to by Neuralink employees and subsequent study participants—he joined a list of about 80 people to ever receive such a device. Brain chip interfaces have been a focus of neurological study for more than 50 years, and there’s a dozen companies in the U.S. and China that have been conducting limited human trials since 1998.

But becoming the first patient to get a Neuralink implant, in particular, is its own right of passage. For one, Neuralink’s device has threads with more than 1,000 electrodes, giving the device a much higher connectivity rate than most of the BCIs currently being studied in humans in the market. But Neuralink also places its electrodes in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement—a more invasive approach than competitors like Synchron or Precision Neuroscience, which also have ongoing studies of multiple patients. Neuralink’s device is also wireless, versus competitors like Blackrock Neurotech that require a wired connection from the implant through the skull to an external receiver for signal capture and decoding (BlackRock Neurotech sells a wireless processor that has been used for research). That means Neuralink participants can go cordless—but the device is battery powered because of it and does need to be charged: around every five hours or so, Arbaugh says. Neuralink heat treats the charger, a coil, into some of Arbaugh’s hats, so that he can recharge it while wearing a hat. In the beginning, Arbaugh couldn’t use the device while it charged, though that’s since been updated.

https://fortune.com/2025/08/23/neuralink-participant-1-noland-arbaugh-18-months-post-surgery-life-changed-elon-musk/

---