When Elon Musk personally contacted a former SpaceX engineering intern to discuss a role on his executive staff in 2017, the woman spoke with excitement to her friends about a high-profile problem-solving role at the rocket company, a dream for someone a few years out of college.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink the official go-ahead to implant its experimental brain chip on a second patient, according to a new report.

The brain-computer interface wars have begun.

For years, startups and academic researchers have been experimenting on humans and animals with placing sensors on or near the brain to deepen our understanding of the body’s most mysterious and complicated organ.

Last week, the world got a peek at how far the research has come, when Elon Musk took to X to show off what his other company, Neuralink, had achieved. Noland Arbaugh, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident, was seen playing online chess, using his brain to control the pieces.

Elon Musk said on the social media platform X on Monday that the first human patient has received a brain implant developed by his company Neuralink. The product also now has a name: Telepathy.

After years of delays, Neuralink started recruiting patients for a clinical trial in the fall after receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and a hospital ethics board. The company is developing a device called a brain-computer interface.

Of all Elon Musk’s exploits — the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars — his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.

What is Neuralink for? In the short term, it’s for helping people with paralysis. But that’s not the whole answer.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's brain-chip startup Neuralink said on Tuesday it has received approval from an independent review board to begin recruitment for the first human trial of its brain implant for paralysis patients.

Those with paralysis due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis may qualify for the study, it said, but did not reveal how many participants would be enrolled in the trial, which will take about six years to complete.

Elon Musk‘s Neuralink has received approval from an independent review board to begin human testing for its brain implant technology, the company announced Tuesday.

The human trials will focus on those who have suffered cervical spinal cord injuries and will take about six years to complete. Test subjects will have the chip, a brain-computer interface, inserted into their heads. The company said the initial goal is to get the human test subjects to operate a computer mouse and keyboard with their thoughts alone.

A few months after getting FDA approval for human trials, Neuralink is looking for its first test subjects. The six-year initial trial, which the Elon Musk-owned company is calling “the PRIME Study,” is intended to test Neuralink tech designed to help those with paralysis control devices. The company is looking for people with quadriplegia due to vertical spinal cord injury or ALS who are over the age of 22 and have a “consistent and reliable caregiver” to be part of the study.

Elon Musk's brain implant startup Neuralink, which was valued at close to $2 billion in a private fundraising round two years ago, is now worth around $5 billion based on privately executed stock trades described to Reuters by five sources with knowledge of the matter.

Some purchases by bullish investors boosted the valuation in recent months, ahead of Neuralink's May 25 announcement that U.S. regulators had approved a human trial on its brain chip, the sources said.

Neuralink, the neurotech startup co-founded by Elon Musk, announced Thursday it has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct its first in-human clinical study.

Neuralink is building a brain implant called the Link, which aims to help patients with severe paralysis control external technologies using only neural signals. This means patients with severe degenerative diseases like ALS could eventually regain their ability to communicate with loved ones by moving cursors and typing with their minds.