In brief
- Elon Musk’s Neuralink and the Sam Altman-backed Merge Labs are driving a new wave of billionaire-backed brain-computer interface ventures.
- Current BCI progress remains medical, with only five Neuralink patients implanted as of September 2025.
- Experts warn BCIs are far from “thought reading,” and billionaire ambitions risk overshadowing real therapeutic potential.
Elon Musk already has rockets, cars, AI, and humanoid robots. Musk’s rival Sam Altman runs OpenAI, the company behind the leading AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Now, both men and other billionaires want a piece of the human brain.
Their latest bets on brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, reveal less about today’s medical breakthroughs and more about a looming contest over who owns the neural on-ramp to digital life. As founders and experts in the space told Decrypt, billionaire attention “elevates the whole industry” even as it distorts priorities.
For billionaires, brain-computer interfaces are not just medical devices—they represent the next potential platform shift, a way to control the gateway between human thought and digital systems.
Owning that interface could mean owning the future of computing. That is why some of the most powerful people in the world are pouring money into BCIs: They see them as a hedge against artificial intelligence, a new control point in the tech stack, and perhaps the ultimate frontier for profit and influence.
Musk and Altman make moves
Musk founded Neuralink in 2016 with the goal of merging with machines, which he claimed may be the only way to keep pace with artificial intelligence. The company recently raised a $650 million Series E, placing it among the best-funded players in the field. Neuralink’s first patient, Noland Arbaugh, has shown he can control a cursor and browse the internet by thought alone.
The results have been mixed, but so far, five patients have now been implanted, with trials expanding to speech impairment and vision restoration. Musk keeps framing BCIs as not just medical devices, but a safeguard for humanity in an AI-dominated future.
Meanwhile, Altman has surfaced as a co-founder of Merge Labs, a new venture aiming to raise around $250 million at a valuation that could reach $850 million. Early reports suggest Merge may pursue non-invasive interfaces, a different path than Neuralink’s brain implants.
For Altman, who already commands one of the most powerful AI companies, the move signals that the next battle is not only about who builds the smartest models but who controls the pipeline that connects them to humans.
Other major bets
The circle extends beyond Musk and Altman. Prominent biohacker Bryan Johnson, who made his fortune in payments, poured $100 million into Kernel in 2016. Kernel develops neurotech platforms for measuring brain activity, positioning itself as an infrastructure play rather than a flashy implant company.
Neuralink’s investors also include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, evidence that Silicon Valley’s venture elite is preparing for the possibility that brain-computer links become the next foundational layer of computing.
“For me, their involvement is a good sign,” Tetiana Aleksandrova, CEO and co-founder of neurotechnology startup Subsense, told Decrypt. “When billionaires step into BCI, they bring visibility and capital that elevate the whole industry. Suddenly, more funds are planning to allocate resources to neurotechnology, more companies are founded, and more engineers discover that this is an exciting space worth dedicating their careers to.”
But Aleksandrova cautioned that billionaire involvement cuts both ways.
“Their funding can accelerate progress at a pace public funding rarely allows,” she explained. “At the same time, the pressure to deliver at startup speed can lead to unrealistic promises that put trust at risk. And in science, trust is just as critical as capital.”
Andreas Melhede, co-founder of neuroscience DAO Elata Bioscience, told Decrypt that while billionaire involvement accelerates interest and funding, it also narrows the agenda.
“The priorities tend to reflect the vision of a single individual or a gatekept corporate agenda, rather than the broader scientific community,” he said. “That means research often skews toward ‘moonshot’ projects designed to capture attention, rather than significant collaborative advances that actually move the field forward.”
Melhede agreed that billionaire rhetoric can both be good for and do harm to the industry, risking overshadowing important but less glamorous work. The bigger risk, he said, is centralization of power over something as important as human brains.
“If one company owns the infrastructure, code, and data, they own the keys to an individual’s thoughts and intentions,” he said. “This discourages transparency [and] slows independent validation and scientific progress. Access to BCI technology—and cognitive autonomy—is subject to the business decisions of a handful of high-profile figures. That is too much risk in too few hands.”
Speculation vs. reality
That tension defines the field. The billionaire pitch is sweeping—control the neural interface, control the future. But the present reality is narrower: coarse signals, fragile hardware, and systems that cannot “read thoughts” in the way public rhetoric sometimes suggests.
Still, such a breakthrough could occur “conceivably some day,” Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, told Decrypt. “For now, we just don’t understand the neural code well enough. Of course, there are already interventions that make sense for people who are paralyzed and with few other options.”
Companies like Synchron and Inbrain continue pilot trials, with Inbrain’s graphene-based BCI platform receiving FDA Breakthrough Device designation. But these remain early-stage efforts, far from mass-market enhancement.
The stakes
The question is less whether brain-computer interfaces will work at scale, and more whose vision defines them. Musk frames BCIs as an existential safeguard. Altman positions them as strategic control points. Johnson and Thiel treat them as infrastructure bets.
For patients, the technology is about restoring lost abilities. For billionaires, it is about shaping the next human-machine platform—one where whoever owns the gateway may one day set the rules for how thought itself becomes data.
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