Then there's the pessimists, like me, wondering how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up.
Being called a bot was unexpected, to put it mildly.
And it worked! The animal subjects were exploited. This man was not.
The only way I can square this circle is with the hypothesis that everything a billionaire does must be exploitative of the poor. (Which holds about as much water as its balancing hypothesis on the far right about leftists being good for nothing more than whining.)
For example demeaning work. Also much of slavery, indentured servitude in the past was chosen and fully reimbursed. Most classic lefties would say all work is exploitation under capitalism.
It's the idea of individualism mostly seen on the right wing and the modern/American democratic left that says that people make free and rational choices in an amoral economic model. When money sets the rules there is no exploitation. I think the reality isn't so black and white and people can make good and bad decisions.
So while I agree he probably wasn't exploited it doesn't mean that others in the same place doing the same things will not be.
And of course, all work is exploitation under capitalism (from a true lefty point of view) but I didn’t perceive the original comment as referring to that level of exploitation. Just saying that this isn’t the hill to die on if one wants a case for capitalist exploitation.
I do understand the dangers of others being exploited down the line but again, that wasn’t what OP was saying either.
Really, if this is exploitative it’s only an indictment of profit incentives in healthcare, which are abhorrent.
Have you ever thought of "choosing slavery" for yourself and your children? No, because given a choice, nobody would choose to be a slave. The fact that people "choose" to be slaves is evidence that they had Hobson's choice. Probably because the wealthy and powerful arranged the system and laws to give people no choice because they wanted slaves.
> "When money sets the rules there is no exploitation
People didn't freely choose to migrate from their ancestral homeland, farming and hunting and grazing animals on common ground, to go and "find their fortune" in the slums and workhouses of the growing urban areas; the land was taken by force, the laws were set by the wealthy to kick the commoners off, to make wild grazing and hunting illegal, to shift the taxes away from land and onto trade, and the commoners were forced into it or "choose" starvation. William the 'Conqueror' in 1066 in Britain started it and set the model for the British colonies and British Empire which pushed it out around the world. From[1]:
"the Anglo-Saxon period as the system of law know as ‘folkland’, whereby land was held in allodial title by the group or regional community .. 1066-7 Norman invasion displaces Anglo-Saxon commons/land ownership model. William the Bastard declares that all land, animals and people in the country belong to him personally. .. We go from a country in which >90% of people owned land, to a country of landless serfs, themselves owned by foreign lords. .. The intended effect was precisely the result: the dispossession of the ‘common folk’ (i.e. anyone who wasn’t a Latin speaking Norman aristocrat) of their ancestral lands and rights."
"Commons Act 1236 allowed Lords to enclose common land .. Statutes of Westminster 1275/85/90 restrict subtenure/sale of parcels of land other than to the direct heirs of the landlord. These restrictions gave rise to .. the retention and control by the nobility of land, money, soldiers and servants via salaries, land sales and rent. In-effect, this was the start of modern wage-slavery"
"1536 to 1541 Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, who privatises church lands (then 1/5th of the country). As these lands were often used by commoners, for grazing – this dispossesses people further from essential access to the land and generates yet more landless people who are wholly dependent upon the emerging model of selling their labour to survive i.e. wage-slavery. 1671 Game Act made it illegal to hunt wild animals, considered a common right since time immemorial. 1700-1850 Parliamentary Enclosures, now no longer held back by the sections of the Church, nor by the power of the (heavily indebted) nobility and Monarchy, land enclosures increase exponentially in both speed and size, and the new urban slums grew correspondingly"
"By 1700 half all arable lands are enclosed, and by 1815 nearly all farm land was enclosed; hunting, grazing, pannage, foraging, wood collection and gleaning rights, are all but lost. From 1750 to 1820 desperate poachers were ‘hanged en-mass’. 1800-1850 the Highland Clearances led to the displacement of up to 500,000 Highlanders and crofters, tens of thousands of which died in the early-mid 19th century, their settlements and economies replaced by Sheep. An esteemed member of the ‘British’ aristocracy noted: ‘It is time to make way for the grand-improvement of mutton over man.’. 1790-1830 a third of the rural population migrates to urban slums. Where they are put to work in early forms of factories, workhouses"
[1] https://tlio.org.uk/a-short-angry-history-of-land-in-britain...
Is funding a high risk project the right allocation of $1.29B that supports a tiny fraction of humanity or would $1.29B be better spent on cancer research, addressing childhood food insecurities (free school lunches), etc?
It's not exactly the same as "so we should exploit the poor and desperate", but that is one of the pitches VCs like the most.
The amount of self-censoring I've ramped up to to keep anything useful from amoral VC's though does appear to prove your point though.
It’s just a pragmatic take on sustainability of innovation. If nobody—no person or government or non-profit—would find value in the future of the work, it merits questioning why do it versus something else.
In theory, yes. But other than maybe rare-disease research, I’m struggling to think of an example in medical research.
Of course, this creates a perverse situation where choosing humanitarian impact today over investment is always irrational, but this is the fundamental tension in charity vs investment, and aside from relying on governments and guilt, I'm not sure we have discovered a great model to solve it
There’s a bunch of effects to consider 1) improving lives right now may well improve subsequent generations lives directly 2) your future project may have a higher failure rate than your current one 3) the problems you are trying to solve may no longer be relevant in the future 4) you could be very wrong about future population growth.
All of this boils down to: you should be risk-discounting future benefits just the same way as you do future cash flows.
Taking a good thing and fucking people over with it in every way possible is "regular business reasoning"
At a certain point it's smart to say "We have the technology to do something good, let's be extremely cautious about concerns over what's profitable and focus on doing what's right with it"
It's really hard for me to imagine that making more logistic sense than the current state of affairs - which is hiring armies of poor able-bodied people in developing countries.
"By using this implant I agree to the collection and sharing of analysis data with Neuralink and its trusted third parties".
[ ] Agree
[ ] Ask me later
Agreeing to data collection and sharing of your brain activity while concerning for it's own reasons, is not the same as forcing them to complete Mechanical Turk like tasks.
I'm pretty sure he does, his actions in government and his lobbying were specifically so he made more money. He does love the tech, though I'm not as optimistic about his love of the ideals (but that might be the socialist in me talking).
I'm am wary about how brain implants could be abused further down the line, but for now it's not the main thing I'm looking at with Neuralink. It seems to be a positive change for the patient, and if costs can be reduced to make it affordable to the masses, it can be a great thing.a
Also, no people of the class we're alluding to would found SpaceX knowing its very likely going to fail and will be an absolute waste of money and potentially risk their whole luxurious welfare.
Or do that twice, with Tesla having teetered as badly too. With him sleeping on the couches in the plants. And not just during crises, as he seemingly visits his operations every week if you see how much he makes good use of his jet.
He's an alien compared to the lot.
Is that why he sued to obtain his $29B package from Tesla shareholders?
Do you have a source for this?
As far as I understand, the bonus package represents a large part of revenue of all Teslas sold since the beginning.
> is something a lot of people are understandably sympathetic to.
Does he also need to pay back stocks when he does a nazi salute, thus tarnishing the brand's image and stock value?
At the time of the original pay package award (3/21/2018), with primary performance conditions being the growth of Tesla market cap (making money for Tesla shareholders), Tesla had a market cap of $53.5B.
At the time the lawsuit against Musk set aside that pay package in January 2024, Tesla's market cap had expanded under Musk's leadership to around $600B.
$600B - $55B = $545 billion in market cap increase (making money for shareholders), which dwarfs both the $29B he agreed to take as well as the larger amount he would have been due under the 2018 agreement.
That's not how public companies are supposed to work. And no, he didn't earn $29 billion.
Elon musk is a Nazi. He should not be running these companies.
He's simply in a position by undermining what normally is in public company governance to siphon money away from the company.
see, I can make up stupid shit too.
People really claiming Elon is somehow a hinderance to the thing he created from scratch and where almost all shareholders are on his side is just hilarious...
I think you're confused on two sort-of-related things: one is the $56B package agreed to and approved in 2018 that a judge decided to revoke, for that he's suing.
The other one is the relatively recent (July/August) $29B package that was created by two indipendent board advisors to give him a "salary" (he did not participate or vote on the creation of this package), since apparently he received nothing from Tesla for the past 6-7 years. This comes as a result of him expressing that if he wants more control over the company, or he's going to build things (AI, robotics) outside of it. Part of the deal is that he's to forfeit this if the ruling on the 2018 package is in his favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tes...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/04/tesla-hands-29b-comp-packa...
I was one of those shareholders who voted FOR that pay package with power of six figures worth of stock. He didn't "sue the shareholders"
Shareholders are strongly on Elon's side here, as they have always have been. The only reason there is a lawsuit is because some bent judge is trying to take the shareholder's power away from them and not grant the pay package. Absolute corruption.
Same judge who forced him to overpay for Twitter.
That's the deal we voted for and Tesla grew 2000%. Very pleased with the outcome and would vote for any pay package at any company that was similarly structured.
Open is a red herring. Mandate documentation and bonding for long-term support. If the cheapest way to provide those are through an open-source platform, great. If not, that’s also fine. Patient outcomes outweigh ideological preferences.
In general, I find the negativity in this whole thread very sad. If I were in the situation were I was looking forward for technology like this, and I'd read the comments here, they would make me very sad. Because in essence, I would learn that politics is more important to some SV people than actual progress.
Frankly, if Elon ended up creating a technology that helps people, I wouldn't care about his politics at all. I'd be damn grateful for someone investing in something that ended up helping me. But obviously, politics trumps empathy here, which is very very sad.
I am still a magnitude off regarding 100k for assistive technologies, but sufficiently large braille displays cost 10k$ to 15k$ in Europe. That is a plain display of 80!!! characters in a single line. No 1080p, mind you. This has been the case since I am alive. The costs are mostly driven by redistriibutors, who usually add around 70% when importing from the US. Do I feel exploited? No, I am glad the technology exists. And frankly, if you have any empathy left, you should as well.
You can see my gloriously broken prototype at PrizeForge. Currently between iterations and still not quite viable enough to properly operate.
So, giving this job to Fortune500 companies is demonstratably not sustainable. A single higher up can terminate such projects with the wink of an eye.
I was more hopeful 20 years ago. Then I watched how all the good work on GNOME2 was basically trashed because of DBus transition, GTK3, and now Wayland. Fact is, hoping for the corporate world to do the work is no guarantee they will continue. And for "scratch your own itch"-philosophy to work, there are not enough disabled OSS devs. Maybe after WWIII there will be a surge in Open Source Accessibility.
Scratching our own itch works better when coordination means we can bundle together a whole lot of itch. There is no such thing as individual incentive to cooperate without a means of coordination. Anything else is just the volunteer's dilemma, and so only small itches get scratched.
Not everything can be handled using death by a thousand cuts. In the Rust in 2021 blog [1], the importance of depth versus breadth was pointed out. Depth comes from dedicated, full-time, paid work.
[1]: https://matklad.github.io/2020/09/12/rust-in-2021.html]
Until subscription price is increased.
In other words, he doesn't do it out of malice. These are the rules of the game.
That’s not even close to the worst case scenario. There are many worse outcomes than the product becoming inoperative, such as it malfunctioning in a way that significantly worsens the person’s quality of life, or its creator deliberately holding functionality hostage. Musk is known for being incredibly petty and thin skinned, I wonder how he’d react to Neuralink users doing or saying things he doesn‘t agree with.
I am genuinely glad this participant and presumably others have a new chance at quality of life, but it would be better if the one in control of the technology weren’t a private individual with such a history, and that the process to reach this milestone had been handled more responsibly and respectfully.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-...
But that last one is the kicker. AR never became mainstream. Unless a brain interface is faster and more intuitive than e.g. a physical keyboard, it will never become mainstream either.
Nobody gives a shit about the iNvEsToR rEtUrN on iNveStMeNt. This is a humanitarian project which should be owned by the people, not a select few billionaires or investors to license out and dangle yet another expense, subscription, or ad model.
Typical communist attitude.
Apparently, many people listen.
If Neuralink proceeds to a scenario where quadriplegic patients can get reliable (ie lifelong) control of their computers for less than $100k that will be a huge win for them for a cost that no one else was willing to pay.
To be clear, at that order of magnitude they might make back their investment, but it won’t be 10x or 100x, and the potential healthy-brain-connected-to-the-AI play is much less rooted in reality than Teslas all becoming taxis.
Worst case scenario is that Elon loses interest and pulls the plug and Mr Arbaugh loses continued tech support a la a google product. I think that’s the one question I wish the author had asked…