Meet the Guys Who Sold "Neuralink" to Elon Musk without Even Realizing It

Last week, we learned that Elon Musk will start a mind-computer interface company called Neuralink. The name added a brainy new entry to Musk's growing scroll of big ideas--Tesla, SolarCity, SpaceX, the Hyperloop. But as the news of Musk's nascent venture to merge man and machine spread across social media, an electrical engineer in Ohio named Pedram Mohseni must have been slapping his forehead. That's because in January he'd agreed to sell the name Neuralink to Musk without realizing it. Mohseni, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, and his scientific partner, Randolph Nudo of Kansas University Medical Center, had owned the trademark on "NeuraLink" since 2015 after creating their own startup company.