Elon Musk Offers To Take Morning Off From Sh*tposting To Put Chip In Your Brain

Thanks, but, no thanks.

Dec 01, 2022

Good morning! Elon Musk wants to surgically implant an iPhone in your brain.

Hey, wait! Where are you going? This is going to be the best thing since sliced Wonder Bread. Would Uncle Elon ever steer you wrong?

Yesterday the tech CEO hosted a "show and tell" event at the headquarters of his Neuralink company. He assembled the crowd to tout plans to seek FDA approval to implant microchips in the brains of IRL human beings within the next six months, based on supposed success in monkeys. Because who wouldn't want to get brain surgery after watching a primate playing pong using only the power of its brain?

Behold the future!

Hello, world! Screengrab CNET livestream

Electrodes you can tape to your head so you can "think" text into your computer tower will surely top everyone's Christmas list!

To be fair, Musk promises that the technology will soon allow the blind to see and restore the ability to walk to someone with a severe spinal cord injury, which would be an amazing gift to humanity. The problem is that Musk is pretty often full of shit.

In 2019, he said he aimed to start clinical trials in humans by the end of 2020. In 2021, he promised to start human trials this year. Now he says he's handed some of his paperwork in to the FDA, and any day now we'll wake up to find that it's Infrastructure week for real.

Musk has promised local governments from California to Ontario that his Boring Company could "solve" their traffic problems with underground tunnels and autonomous vehicles, only to ghost them , sometimes killing off other public works projects in the process. The only actual Boring Company tunnel is a demonstration loop in Las Vegas where you can pay someone to drive you in a 1.6 mile circle.

He promised to produce affordable electric cars for the masses. The cheapest, lowest end Tesla clocks in at $47,000.

And we still haven't colonized the moon — not that there appears to be an enormous appetite for that kind of thing.

But perhaps most important, Musk appears to spend most of his time losing his goddamn mind on Twitter — a company he was forced to buy after negotiating a disastrous acquisition deal, and which he appears to be incinerating in a spectacular $44 billion bonfire. Every single day he logs on to demonstrate that he doesn't understand the First Amendment . Or computer code . Or labor law .

He plays footsie with Nazi sympathizers, routinely promotes fake news , and is generally fucking gross . Plus he tells stupid lies, like yesterday when he picked a fight with Apple by falsely claiming the company had halted advertising on the platform and was about to boot Twitter out of the app store, only to walk it back today as a misunderstanding.

But most of all, his management style could be described as erratic at best. He fires half the workforce, only to come groveling trying to hire some of them back . Dozens of seasoned executives nope out at once. He's missing payroll in the UK and Germany. He's imposing loyalty tests on employees, even as he scours the Slack and office email and fires people who've criticized him.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but none of this bespeaks a company whose CEO is someone you can trust to tell the truth, much less start monkeying around in your cranial cavity. And perhaps we all have Twitter brain (it me!), but that doesn't mean we're going to line up to the let the "Chief Twit" perform brain surgery on us.

Nor does it seem like a company run by Elon Musk is a great place to work. And since the Neuralink event was billed as a recruiting event for top talent, it bears pointing out, as Reuters does, that Musk already approached Synchron, a competitor company in August, after screaming at employees to BRAIN CHIP FASTER failed to produce the desired result.

Ever heard of Synchron? Probably not, since that company's CEO doesn't spend all his time begging for adulation on social media. Instead, that guy managed to get regulatory approval in 2021, and implanted one of the company's chips in a person this year. (Well, probably not personally.)

But, hey, look at this pig on a treadmill !