This one is worth conceding up front: it really happened. Weeks after Neuralink’s first human implant in early 2024, a number of the ultra-thin electrode threads in patient Noland Arbaugh’s brain partially retracted — reported at the time as up to about 85% pulling back — which reduced the number of functional electrodes the device could read from. That is a genuine, disclosed engineering setback on the first human ever to get the implant, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What the "failure" framing leaves out is everything that happened next. Neuralink restored much of the lost performance through software and signal-processing updates, and Arbaugh kept using the implant — continuing to control a computer by thought and setting records for cursor control. For the second patient, the company changed the surgery itself, reducing brain motion and seating the implant closer to the surface, and reported no thread retraction. By 2026 the trial had grown to more than twenty participants across four countries with no reported serious adverse device events. The honest verdict is that the first-patient retraction was a real early problem, openly reported and then engineered around — the ordinary, messy arc of pioneering implantable medicine, not proof the whole project failed. Verdict: mixed — the retraction was real and serious; "failure" ignores the recovery and the fixes that followed.