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# The Real Origin of Elon Musk’s Neuralink: A Conversation in the Back Seat of a Model S in Hong Kong
- URL: https://www.neurabc.com/the-real-origin-of-elon-musks-neuralink-a-conversation-in-the-back-seat-of-a-model-s-in-hong-kong/
- Published: 2026-11-11T14:15:11.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-11T14:15:11.000Z
- Author: zhangguanghua

In 2016, the plane had just landed in Hong Kong.

Elon Musk and Jon McNeill, then Tesla’s global head of sales, were sitting in the back of a Model S. Both were looking down at their phones, catching up on emails. Outside the window were the streets of Hong Kong; inside the car, the only sound was the soft tapping of fingers on screens.

Elon Musk suddenly turned and asked, “How fast can you type with your thumbs?”

McNeill paused. “I’ve never timed it. No idea.”

“The average person does about 18 words a minute,” Elon Musk said. “What about on a keyboard?”

“Around 60 to 70.”

“Let’s call it 60,” Elon Musk replied. “So you’re more than three times faster on a keyboard than on your phone. The phone has slowed down the speed at which humans can input information into a machine by a factor of three. Do you think that’s a small thing?”

Before McNeill could answer, Elon Musk continued: “If input is three times slower, then the speed at which you get answers and make decisions is also three times slower. So what if… you could just think, and send those thoughts straight into the machine?”

“That would eliminate the keyboard and the thumbs entirely,” McNeill said.

“Exactly,” Elon Musk nodded. “That would remove the front-end constraint on human computing. That’s a big deal.”

At this point, most people would have found the idea interesting and gone back to their emails.

Elon Musk didn’t.

He immediately turned to Sam Teller, his chief of staff in the front seat, and said, “Sam, track down the top brain-computer interface researchers in the world and get their papers. I want to read them while we’re in China and on the flight back. I want to meet them next week. I’m going to start working on brain-computer interfaces.”

One week later, he was sitting across from those researchers.

That same year, Neuralink was founded.

This was not a decision that emerged from months of strategic planning. It was the result of spotting an everyday friction—“typing is too slow”—extracting a first-principles insight from it, and acting immediately. Elon Musk didn’t see a bad phone experience; he saw a severely underestimated bandwidth bottleneck in how humans transmit information to machines. Once that bottleneck was identified, the next step was no longer to optimize keyboards or voice input, but to bypass them entirely.

Many people assume Neuralink’s origins are rooted in science fiction, or inspired by the “neural lace” in Iain M. Banks’ *Culture* series. That may well be true. But according to the person sitting next to him at the time, the moment the idea actually took root happened in the back seat of a Model S in Hong Kong—from the question “How fast can you type with your thumbs?” to meeting the world’s top researchers the following week, with almost no pause in between.

What separates people is often not who thinks of an idea first, but who starts acting the moment the idea appears.