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Ex-Tesla President Jon McNeill reveals Elon Musk's idea for Neuralink started in the back of a Model S in Hong Kong, with Elon asking how fast he could type. Elon Musk then asked for the top brain-computer interface researchers’ papers on the spot, and met them the next week: “Elon and I were traveling together to China. We just landed in Hong Kong. We’re in the back of a Model S, and we’re both catching up on our inbox on our phones. And he looks over at me and says, how fast can you type with your thumbs?” “And I said, I have no idea. I’ve never timed it. He’s like, well, the average human’s 18 words a minute. He said, how fast can you type on a keyboard? I said, I think it’s like 60 or 70 words a minute. So let’s call it 60.” “He said, exactly. So you are more than three times faster on the keyboard than you are on your phone. This device has slowed the input into the machine. And he’s like, that’s a big deal, because you can’t get speed of answers and decision making if you’re going three times slower.” “He’s like, what if you could think into the machine? I was like, well, that would blow this constraint away, because now we don’t have keyboards and thumbs to go through. You’re thinking in real time into the machine. He’s like, exactly. That would pull the front-end constraint off of the compute for humans. That’s a big deal.” “So he didn’t sit on these ideas. He’s very unique in this way. And he said to his chief of staff, Sam Teller, who’s in the front seat: Sam, can you track down the top neuro computer science interface researchers in the world? Get their papers.” “I want to read the papers while we’re here in China and on the flight back, and I want to meet with these people next week, because I want to start to work on brain-computer interface. And just like that, fast.” “So by the next week, he’s meeting with some of the top minds in the world on this topic, and he doesn’t let go until he starts Neuralink.”