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, who’s 31, 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 that 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 a dozen companies in the U.S. and China 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.
Of course, there is also the fact that Neuralink is Elon Musk’s brain chip company, which draws an entirely different level of scrutiny and attention to any study participant. Since Arbaugh revealed himself as P1, he has become a public figure, frequently invited on podcasts and having journalists show up at his home. His X account has been hacked, and he told me that a SWAT team showed up with AR-15s after someone gave a false tip to the local sheriff’s office that Arbaugh was in danger.
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 of months for us to 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.”
Since Arbaugh became the first Neuralink patient in January 2024, there have been eight more individuals, including one woman, to enroll in the company’s ongoing clinical trials, which are now open in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and the United Arab Emirates. So far, all of the surgeries have taken place at hospitals in the U.S., with two of the participants receiving the implant on the same day at the end of July. All of the study participants suffer from either paralysis or ALS, a nervous system disease that causes loss of muscle control. “Our goal is to really build a whole brain interface,” Neuralink cofounder and president DJ Seo said during Neuralink’s summer update meeting.
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.
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