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 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 I first reached out to Arbaugh in early June to see how the BCI had changed his day-to-day 1.5 years in, it took a couple months for us to finally pin down a time. When we finally did hop on the phone, he laughed. “I’m just so busy all the time,” he says. “That is so different than what life was like before… I feel like I’m playing catch-up for eight years of not doing anything—kind of lying around, staring at walls.”
For Arbaugh, the Neuralink device has been entirely transformative, he says. He uses it about 10 hours a day to control his computer so he can study, read, and game—and to handle things like scheduling an interview with me. Arbaugh enrolled in classes at his community college in Arizona, where he has started taking prerequisites he needs for a degree in neuroscience, and, as he tells Fortune, he’s working on starting his own business—paid professional speaking engagements and live talks.
As he talks about all of it with me, his excitement—and a newfound sense of purpose—is palpable. Before his surgery, “I would stay up all night and sleep all day, and I didn’t really [want to] bother anyone or ruin any plans or get in the way of anything,” he says. “I just had no purpose… I was just kind of going through the motions, waiting for something to happen.”
Arbaugh never lost the ability to think or speak due to his accident. But in the last year and a half, he has regained more of the autonomy he lost with his disability, and is able to do more things for himself. “I feel like I have potential again. I guess I always have had potential, but now I’m finding a way to fulfill that potential in meaningful ways. It’s a lot different.”
“I never doubted for a second that it would work,” Arbaugh, who personally didn’t have strong opinions of Elon Musk one way or another, says.
Arbaugh says he received an email from the Barrow Neurological Institute the day after he applied, and started going through the process. There was a screening call and an interview, and then about a month later, he was going into the nearby hospital for a full day of scans and testing. About three months after he applied, Arbaugh found out that he was going to be the first participant, and his surgery was scheduled a few weeks later. While Arbaugh is not paid, Neuralink covers the cost of the surgery and the implant, and the company reimburses him for travel to and from his check-ups or for expenses directly related to the study. (Arbaugh says that, with FDA approval, Neuralink did pay him for two talks he gave at Neuralink, including the February 2024 talk where he revealed his identity for the first time)
Despite the risks of being the first participant of an experimental clinical trial, Arbaugh says it was an easy decision for him. “I decided that, even if it didn’t work—even if something went terribly wrong—I knew that it would help someone down the road,” Arbaugh says. “And I knew that good or bad, they would learn something and push this technology forward.”
Technically I am a cyborg because I have been enhanced by a ‘machine’, but I still see myself as a regular guy
As you may imagine, it was a little harder for his parents. Arbaugh says he remembers sending his mother the consent forms he had to sign for her to read over, which contained a laundry list of potential risks associated with the surgery—and every imaginable thing that could go wrong with the experimental device. He said she read one or two items and then put them away, unable to read any further. But ultimately, both his parents supported his decision, he says, and never showed that the decision was hard on them. “I hadn’t really been excited about many things before that point, so they were just happy to help in any way they could,” he says.
Arbaugh was also extremely decisive in his choice to go public with his identity. He says he wanted to show people that he believed this device was safe, and what could be possible for those who used it.
“I wanted to share it with people, because I thought it was huge, and I still do,” Arbaugh says. “I think it’s one of the biggest leaps in technology that we’ve had in a really long time, and I think that it’s going to keep growing.”
Arbaugh insists that Neuralink has never tried to dictate what he can or can’t say publicly, and he says he has never been asked to sign any kind of non-disclosure agreement. It’s been the opposite, he says: Neuralink staffers have encouraged him to disclose whatever he’d like to. But he has voluntarily chosen not to talk about some things on occasion. For example, shortly after his surgery, some of the threads retracted, causing him to lose much of the control he had over the device. The incident was later published in the Wall Street Journal, and Neuralink published a blog post about it. It was a big deal, Arbaugh says, but he decided to wait for the team to figure out what had happened and how to repair it, which they did.
Revealing something like that at the time would have been “extremely rash of me, and it would have absolutely made people lose faith in the product,” he says. “That’s not what I want. I love this thing. I love what Neuralink is doing. I love all of it, and I’m really proud of it.”
“The future is going to be weird, but pretty cool,” he said.
As of right now, Neuralink is still adding patients to its various trials. At the end of July, Neuralink announced it had received approval to introduce a trial in Great Britain via University College London Hospitals and Newcastle Hospitals.
“We’re very cautious with the Neuralinks in humans,” Musk said during the summer update. “That’s the reason we’re not moving faster than we are is because we are taking great care with each individual to make sure we never miss.”
Indeed, there is something uniquely compelling about the vision at Neuralink and its mission to help those with disabilities. And there’s something uniquely compelling about Arbaugh, too. Perhaps it’s his sense of humor, his earnestness, or his humility—but it’s hard not to like him at once.
He speaks about his three conversations with Musk—once via FaceTime the day of his surgery, in person post-surgery, then later at the Austin Gigafactory—nonchalantly, saying Musk is a “cool dude” who “has done a lot of his life and is super impressive, but at the end of the day is just another guy.”
After our interview, I asked Arbaugh if he considers himself a “cyborg”—the scifi term coined in the ’60s to describe a human being who has been enhanced by a technological body part or device. “Technically I am a cyborg because I have been enhanced by a ‘machine,’” he says. “But I still see myself as a regular guy… But it’s fun to play around with.”
A year-and-a-half after his surgery, Arbaugh still has so much to say about all of it: about neuroscience, about his faith, and about what technology is making possible for paralysis. This whole ordeal has given him a new appreciation for what’s possible, he says: “I always thought that [paralysis was] going to be fixed through drugs, or some sort of new surgery, or something they discovered in science—stem cells or something of that nature.”
But now that he has been thrust into the tech world, Arbaugh says he’s thinking about it differently. “I see how the advancements in tech at this point are going to solve so many things. They are, I think, the future of medicine. I think a lot of disabilities, cures, and answers that we’ve been searching for a long time will come through tech—and that kind of surprised me.”
In the meantime, there is a lot for him to soak up in this new way of life—where he can play Mario Kart with his dad, go back to college, and build a business: “I definitely didn’t expect for this to ever happen,” he says.
