It’s been announced that Elon Musk’s brainchild Neuralink has been under federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General after researchers came forward with documents revealing the gruesome extent of animal testing the project has called for.


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Thus far, Neuralink experimentation has killed over 1500 animals, including rats, mice, pigs, sheep, and even monkeys. Musk’s employees claim that this excessive number is due to pressure from Musk himself to expedite research. 



According to Reuters, he’s cultivated an extremely high-stress environment within Neuralink, apparently telling employees to "imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads" as well as threatening to ‘trigger a “market failure”’ within the company – whatever that implies. It’s this environment that’s led to ethically questionable animal testing procedures and unusually high numbers of animal deaths. 



Note: these deaths aren’t always the result of the chip implant itself, but are carried out in order to gather data post-implant from autopsies. Nevertheless, its been reported that test monkeys are suffering from chronic infections and psychological trauma due to repeated surgeries.



But Musk’s die-hard fans have a different theory. On Friday, December 2nd, Elon Musk tweeted in support of a Twitter thread by journalist Matt Taibi dubbed “the Twitter Files” that goes into depth illustrating how both the political left and the right, but especially members of the left, enforced a concerning amount of censorship over tweets spreading information they deemed false or harmful. He gives special attention to the supposed suppression of tweets about controversies around Hunter Biden during the 2020 election. The legitimacy of the screenshots included in the thread is still to be determined. Supposedly, Musk provided these screenshots to Taibi. The theory here is that the Neuralink investigation is payback for leaking this information.



So is this federal investigation revenge for spilling the beans on censorship of Hunter Biden “misinformation?” A federal probe has been investigating Neuralink for months before Musk endorsed this reveal, but the Neuralink investigation going public does have eerily convenient timing and has the potential to distract from other Musk-related news fairly well… Intentional? You decide.