Elon Musk’s creepy brain chip company Neuralink reportedly filed as a “small disadvantaged business” with the Small Business Administration, shortly before securing a financing round that valued the company at $9 billion.
CNBC reports that according to an investigation by MuskWatch, Neuralink, the brain-computer interface (BCI) company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, labeled itself as a “small disadvantaged business” in a federal filing with the Small Business Administration (SBA) in April. The filing came just before the company closed a $650 million funding round in early June, which valued Neuralink at an impressive $9 billion.
According to the SBA’s website, a “small disadvantaged business” (SDB) designation is given to companies that are at least 51 percent owned and controlled by one or more “disadvantaged” persons, who must meet qualifications as both socially and economically disadvantaged. This designation can help businesses gain preferential access to federal procurement opportunities.
The filing, dated April 24, listed Jared Birchall, a Neuralink executive who also manages Musk’s money as head of his family office, as the contact person. Interestingly, the filing would have reached the SBA at a time when Musk was leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he worked to slash the size of federal agencies.
Neuralink has attracted significant investment from prominent firms such as ARK Invest, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital. The company stated that the fresh capital would help bring its technology to more patients and develop new devices that “deepen the connection between biological and artificial intelligence.”
The decision to label Neuralink as an SDB has raised eyebrows, given that Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, is at the helm of several other high-profile companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, artificial intelligence startup xAI, and tunneling boondoggle The Boring Company. In 2022, Musk also led the $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which he later renamed X before merging it with xAI.
Under Musk’s leadership at DOGE, the initiative targeted government agencies that emphasized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In February, DOGE and Musk boasted of cutting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of funding for the Department of Education that would have gone towards DEI-related training grants.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
