Compare / Neuralink vs Pinterest
NEURALINK
Elon Musk decided that the best way to keep up with artificial intelligence was to literally plug a computer i…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Neuralink
BUSINESS MODEL
Neuralink
Neuralink doesn't have a traditional revenue model yet — it's still in clinical trials. The near-term plan is medical devices sold to hospitals and clinics for treating neurological conditions.
Brain-computer interfaces for paralysis, ALS, blindness, and other conditions would be reimbursed by insurance and healthcare systems, similar to cochlear implants or deep brain stimulators.
The long-term vision is consumer neurotechnology — healthy people choosing to get brain implants for enhanced cognition, communication, or AI interaction. This is years or decades away and faces massive regulatory and ethical hurdles.
But if it works, the total addressable market is literally every human brain on the planet.
The surgical robot is potentially a separate revenue stream. Even if the implant itself doesn't dominate, the precision robotics technology developed for neural surgery could be licensed to other medical device companies.
Neuralink has also built custom chip fabrication capabilities that could have applications beyond brain interfaces.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Neuralink
Elon Musk had been talking about brain-computer interfaces publicly since at least 2016. His stated motivation was existential: if AI becomes superintelligent, humans need a way to merge with it or risk becoming irrelevant.
The solution, in his mind, was a direct neural link between the human brain and computers.
Neuralink was quietly incorporated in July 2016 in California. Musk recruited a team of eight co-founders — neuroscientists, engineers, and chip designers from institutions like UC Berkeley, MIT, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The founding team included Ben Rapoport, a neurosurgeon who understood both the medical and engineering sides, and Dongjin Seo, who had done PhD research on neural dust (tiny wireless brain sensors).
The company operated in stealth for two years before a 2019 presentation where Musk revealed the vision: a coin-sized device implanted in the skull containing thousands of ultra-thin electrode threads inserted into the brain by a custom-built surgical robot. The threads are thinner than a human hair — roughly 5 microns wide — and each one contains multiple electrodes that read neural signals.
The robot was necessary because no human surgeon could place threads that thin without damaging brain tissue.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Neuralink
Neuralink's growth strategy is the classic Musk playbook: start with the premium use case that justifies the cost, then scale down. Phase 1 is medical — treat severe neurological conditions where no other option exists.
Quadriplegia, ALS, locked-in syndrome. Patients who literally cannot move or speak are willing to undergo experimental brain surgery.
The FDA granted Breakthrough Device designation in 2020, and the first human trial (PRIME study) began in 2024.
Phase 2 is expanding medical indications — blindness, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson's. Each new condition multiplies the patient population and the regulatory pathway, building clinical evidence along the way.
Phase 3 — the moonshot — is consumer enhancement. Musk has described this as "conceptual telepathy," where you think a message and it sends.
This phase requires proving extraordinary safety over years of medical use first. Nobody is going to electively implant a brain chip unless the medical version has been proven safe for a decade.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Neuralink
The FDA and regulatory approval process is the primary bottleneck. Brain implants are Class III medical devices — the highest risk category.
Every design change, every new indication, requires extensive clinical data. The USDA also investigated Neuralink in 2022 for potential animal welfare violations in their primate testing program, which created PR headaches.
Long-term biocompatibility is an unsolved problem. The brain treats any foreign object as an invader and forms scar tissue around it, which can degrade signal quality over time.
Making an implant that works reliably for decades inside a hostile biological environment is one of the hardest engineering problems in medicine. Neuralink's thread retraction issue in their first human patient — where some threads pulled away from the brain — highlighted how much work remains.
Talent retention has been rocky. Max Hodak, the original president, left in 2021.
Several founding scientists departed. Working for Musk is notoriously demanding, and the timeline pressure on a medical device company clashes with the inherent need for cautious, methodical development.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Neuralink
The N1 Implant — a coin-sized device (23mm diameter, 8mm thick) implanted flush with the skull containing a custom chip that wirelessly transmits neural data to external devices via Bluetooth. The R1 Robot — a precision surgical system that inserts 64 flexible threads carrying 1,024 electrodes into the brain with micron-level accuracy, avoiding blood vessels using computer vision.
The N1 User App — software that translates neural signals into computer commands, allowing users to control cursors, keyboards, and eventually robotic limbs through thought alone. BCI Software Platform — the signal processing and machine learning stack that decodes raw brain signals into intended actions.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Neuralink
Elon Musk has been the primary funder, investing hundreds of millions of his personal wealth. The company raised $205 million in a Series C in 2021, then $280 million in a Series D in 2023 led by Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's firm).
A 2024 round reportedly valued the company at $8.9 billion. Google Ventures (GV) and DFJ Growth have also participated.
The investor base is narrow compared to most startups at this valuation.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.