Neuralink

The Boring Company

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.

The Boring Company

The Boring Company's business model is infrastructure contracting — they bid on tunnel construction projects and get paid by the clients (usually government agencies or private venues). Revenue comes from construction contracts for building the tunnels and from operating the transit systems within them.

The core economic thesis is that tunnel boring is absurdly expensive — typically $100 million to $1 billion per mile — because the technology hasn't meaningfully improved in decades. The Boring Company claims they can reduce costs by 10x through smaller tunnel diameters, continuous boring (no stopping to install tunnel walls), electric machines instead of diesel, and autonomous operation.

The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop was built for $47 million — about 1.3 miles of twin tunnels. That's roughly $18 million per lane-mile, which is genuinely cheap compared to traditional subway construction.

Whether that cost advantage holds at scale on larger, more complex projects remains unproven.

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.

The Boring Company

The Boring Company started, quite literally, with a tweet. In December 2016, Elon Musk was stuck in LA traffic and tweeted "Traffic is driving me nuts.

Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." Most people assumed he was joking. He wasn't.

Within weeks, Musk had a team digging a test trench in the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne, California. The initial concept was ambitious: a network of underground tunnels where cars would be loaded onto electric sleds and whisked through tubes at 150 mph.

Think the Hyperloop but underground and for individual vehicles.

The company was formally incorporated in late 2016 as a subsidiary of SpaceX. The name was classic Musk — a pun on both tunnel boring and the company's supposed boringness compared to rockets and electric cars.

Early funding came from Musk personally and from a surprisingly successful merchandise operation: The Boring Company sold 20,000 branded flamethrowers (rebranded as "Not-a-Flamethrower" for legal reasons) for $500 each in 2018, generating $10 million in revenue before they built a single tunnel.

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.

The Boring Company

The strategy is to prove the concept in Las Vegas and then replicate it in cities worldwide. The Vegas Loop is the showcase project — a real, operating system that city officials and transportation planners can visit and experience.

Las Vegas was a strategic choice. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was a willing early customer.

Nevada has friendlier regulations than most states. The flat desert geology is easier to bore through than urban bedrock.

And tourism means high passenger volume to demonstrate utilization.

The plan is to expand from convention center shuttle to city-wide transit system. Clark County approved the full 68-mile Vegas Loop expansion.

If it works — moving tens of thousands of passengers daily, reliably, at low cost — it becomes the proof point for selling Loop systems to other cities.

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.

The Boring Company

The core criticism is that The Boring Company has essentially built a taxi tunnel, not a transit system. Traditional subways move thousands of people per hour in high-capacity trains.

The Vegas Loop moves people in individual Teslas — one car at a time. Critics argue this is fundamentally less efficient and will never match the throughput of real mass transit.

Scaling beyond Las Vegas is unproven. Urban tunneling in cities with existing underground infrastructure — sewers, subway lines, utility conduits, building foundations — is exponentially harder than boring through Nevada desert.

The cost advantages may not hold in complex geology.

The autonomous driving requirement is another dependency. The long-term vision requires fully autonomous vehicles navigating tunnels at high speed.

Currently, the Vegas Loop uses human drivers in Teslas going 35 mph. Removing human drivers and increasing speed are both necessary for the economics to work at scale, and both depend on Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology actually becoming fully autonomous.

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 1,024 electrode threads 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.

The Boring Company

Prufrock — the next-generation tunnel boring machine designed to bore at over 1 mile per week, compared to the industry standard of roughly 300 feet per week. The name comes from T.S.

Eliot's poem. Vegas Loop — the operational system under Las Vegas with 93 stations planned across the Strip, downtown, and the airport.

When complete, it would be a 68-mile network. Loop Transit System — the overall concept of small-diameter tunnels with autonomous electric vehicles providing point-to-point underground transportation.

Not-a-Flamethrower — technically a roofing torch in a Nerf gun shell. Sold 20,000 units at $500 each.

Not really a product anymore but too iconic to leave out.

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.

The Boring Company

Elon Musk funded the company initially from personal wealth. Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Craft Ventures, DFJ Growth, and 8VC participated in the $675 million Series C in 2022 that valued the company at $5.7 billion.

Vy Capital and Brookfield also invested. The investor base is heavily Musk-aligned — many of the same funds that back SpaceX and Tesla.