‘Elon Musk implanted a chip in my brain – it’s the coolest thing that’s happened to me’

In 2016 an accident left Noland Arbaugh quadriplegic but, with help from the world’s richest man, the ‘neuralnaut’ has a new lease of life

Last week, Noland Arbaugh made the opening move of the Speed Chess Championship in Paris – a competition featuring the game’s biggest names. More remarkable, though, is that, in a tournament world-first, he moved the pawn using only his mind. 
Arbaugh, 30, is the world’s first recipient of a brain chip created by Neuralink, the brain-computer interface (BCI) company founded by Elon Musk. Chess has become a huge part of the 30-year-old’s life; it was one of the few things he could still do following an accident that left him paralysed below the shoulders. (He previously used a mouth stick to play games online.) 
But since receiving the implant in January – and using his brain to move pieces across the board – it has become his portal to the rest of the world. The company released a video of him playing a month after his surgery; opening the Speed Chess Championship, he says, was “the coolest thing that’s happened to me”.
Neuralink was founded in California in 2016, the same year that a then 22-year-old Arbaugh was left quadriplegic after a freak accident while swimming in a lake, and the trip to France proved how much his life has changed since his surgery in January.
“It’s made me a lot more independent,” Arbaugh tells me when we meet in the basement of the e-sports venue where he has just finished rehearsing his opening move. He is dressed much the same as any millennial might be – cap, beard and a thin gold hoop earring – though accompanied by the modified wheelchair he has relied on for the past eight years, and his parents, who help him to drink and eat.
After the accident, he moved back in with them at the family home in Arizona, where they and care staff look after him full-time. Losing control of his limbs has put the most extreme physical limitations on his life – but recent months have given him a new outlook. “I feel like I’m capable of going back to school and getting a job, which are things that I couldn’t even imagine doing before Neuralink,” he says. For the first time in almost a decade, “I feel I’m just as capable as everyone else.”
Arbaugh first heard of Neuralink’s clinical trial when his friend called him to ask: “Do you want to get a chip in your brain?” 
“I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ Kind of jokingly, we applied and everything worked out.” 
The chip has 64 “threads” with 16 electrodes, and is planted in his motor cortex on the left side of his brain, the area that controls his right hand movement. When he wants to move a cursor on a screen, or his fingers one way or another, thinking now makes it so. “There’s lots of machine learning involved,” he explains. “I try something, the implant learns it, and over time, it just gets better and better.”
Being part of the study involves four hours of meetings with the team, five days a week, which he attends virtually from his home. It also means access to Neuralink’s overlord. Arbaugh first met Musk via FaceTime earlier this year, on the day of his surgery: “He was going to be at the hospital at Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, and then he had a malfunction with his plane, so he couldn’t make it.” They have met in person since, and Arbaugh describes him as “just a regular guy; he’s very successful. I think that we’re kind of kindred spirits in a lot of ways.” 
It’s hard to imagine that the self-effacing Arbaugh shares much with the pantomime villain who so loves picking fights on social media. But he believes that Musk’s work with Neuralink shows the billionaire’s commitment to making serious improvements to people’s lives. “We have a shared vision of what this could do for the future and for people in general,” he says. “I know that both of us just want to help in some way.”
Arbaugh manages to communicate that aim plainly, Musk less so. Where is his message getting lost? “He doesn’t hold anything back; he says whatever he wants to say… I think because he’s so powerful, he doesn’t care,” Arbaugh mulls. “Most people would be afraid to say certain things because they could be cancelled, they can have their livelihoods taken away from them. Their lives can be ruined. He doesn’t have to worry about that.”
When Neuralink released its video of Arbaugh playing online chess a month after surgery, it hailed a “breakthrough.” But things derailed soon after. A number of the chip’s connective threads “retracted” in Arbaugh’s brain, reducing the speed and efficacy of his commands. 
Plummeting from what had been a “luxury overload” – the post-Neuralink world in which he could craft a message in seconds, thanks to chip-enabled cursor control, rather than spending 10-15 minutes using voice control on a computer, and no longer needing to use a mouth stick to operate an iPad – was difficult to bear. “It was really hard, mainly because I was on such a high,” he says. “One day, I’m off about to tour Neuralink, and meet the whole team for the first time. And then they tell me: ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’ve lost control of this, basically. We don’t know how to fix it.’” 
It left Arbaugh grappling not only cognitively and physically, but philosophically, too. “I thought, why would God give me this opportunity and only let me do it for a month? I just felt I had so much more to offer, and it had so much more to offer me.”
Still, the chip could continue to collect data that might be useful for future devices, he reasoned, “and that gave me a lot of purpose. And even if it never worked again on me, I would still be helping out.” (The functionality has since been regained.) That proved true in July, when a second patient received the Neuralink implant with the threads issue fixed. “It’s an amazing feeling to know that I had some sort of impact on that for everyone that comes after me,” he says.
Arbaugh, a former student and athlete at Texas A&M University, was working as a camp counselor when he decided to go swimming in Pennsylvania eight years ago with friends – a day that now yields only fuzzy memories of diving into a lake, hitting his head on something and floating to the surface face-down, with no sensation below the shoulders. 
Initially, he struggled with his new life as a quadriplegic. He recalls one “terrible” attempt to take a flight a few months after his injury, which required people to physically lift him into the plane seat. “Just to be viewed like that – it was very, very hard,” he says. Greater acceptance came around the two-year mark, the point at which doctors suggest that further improvement is unlikely.
Renewed vigour came too. “I started trying to train my brain to study again because I wanted to go back to school. I was just working every day as much as I could, bettering myself in every way.” That included applying to medical trials – none of which he heard back from, until Neuralink responded to his application. The company then whittled him down to one of three potential candidates before selecting him to be their first patient.
Prior to surgery, which involved removing a piece of his skull and implanting a pound coin-sized device, he had to sign off on a “laundry list of risks”, including the possibility that he might not survive the operation (his mother couldn’t bear to read it in full). The outcome he was most worried about, however, was some sort of “mental deficiency”. 
“I can’t move, so my brain is kind of who I am at this point,” he says. “And letting someone go in and poke around in there is pretty terrifying.” Optimism ultimately outweighed fear. “I wanted to take on that risk in case anything would go wrong. I wanted it to happen to me instead of anyone else.”
He left the hospital a day later; life has unequivocally been better since. But the chip is not a panacea – it cannot give him back more than a sliver of what he has lost. “I’ve always wanted to be a husband and a father… But it’s just not feasible in my mind,” he says. “I don’t feel I would be a good husband; I don’t feel I would be a good father. I would just be another burden [to a partner] on top of having that kid. My wife would have to take care of me and the baby. [I think] anyone I would be in a relationship with could do better in a lot of ways.”
It is the only topic on which Arbaugh sounds even remotely defeatist. “It’s something that I still struggle with constantly. But I’ve made my decision, and I’m going to go from there.”
The first stage of the trial ends after a year, with five “more hands-off” years to follow – during which time the technology may improve further still. For now, he is considering a future in law or neuroscience, as well as being a spokesman for Neuralink, articulately showcasing the technology’s advances in real time. 
The relationship cuts both ways: Arbaugh knows that becoming the firm’s first “neuralnaut” (he also jokingly calls himself a “cyborg”) means doors opening for him that won’t for the second or third in line. 
He has also acquired semi-celebrity status. In June he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world. (Rogan told him: “I have a feeling if there’s a movie that they do in the future of how the world changed in 2024, you’re going to be in that movie.”) 
He has over 100,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter, where fans fill his feed with messages of support. One writes that “you’re the Neil Armstrong of a new chapter for humanity”,  which “just feels weird,” Arbaugh says. “I don’t see myself like that.”
Most meaningful are the messages from others navigating paralysis, who see his progress as permission to hope. He is sanguine about the future of BCIs, which were first implanted into humans in 1998. 
“I think in my lifetime, it’s definitely possible to cure something like paralysis, so I’m really hopeful for that,” he says, referencing studies which have shown that implants can create a “digital bridge” over damaged spinal cords, allowing patients to walk again. 
Does he think he might one day, too? “Absolutely,” he says. “But I don’t put all of my hope in that. If it didn’t happen and that’s what I was hoping for, it would crush me.” 
Even so, he knows that being in this trial could alter the course of history. “If it happens, great. If not, I know it’ll happen for someone someday, and I had a part in that. If I can make it where no one ever has to be paralysed ever again, I think it’s worth going through what I’ve been through.”