Dr. Joshua Bederson places Precision Neuroscience’s electrodes onto a brain.
Ashley Capoot
As the lights dimmed in an operating room at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Dr. Joshua Bederson prepared to make history.
Bederson, system chair for the Department of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Health System, is no stranger to long hours in an operating room. The former competitive gymnast has completed more than 6,500 procedures in his career, and he said he visualizes the steps for each one as if he’s rehearsing for a routine.
On this particular morning in April, Bederson was readying for a meningioma resection case, which meant he would be removing a benign brain tumor. Bederson said his primary focus is always on caring for the patient, but in some cases, he also gets to help advance science.
This procedure was one such case.
A small crowd gathered as Bederson took his seat in the operating room, his silhouette aglow from the bright white light shining on the patient in front of him. Health-care workers, scientists and CNBC craned forward – some peering through windows – to watch as Bederson placed four electrode arrays from Precision Neuroscience onto the surface of the patient’s brain for the first time.
An electrode is a small sensor that can detect and carry an electrical signal, and an array is a grid of electrodes. Neurosurgeons use electrodes during some procedures to help monitor and avoid important parts of the brain, like areas that control speech and movement.
Precision is a three-year-old startup building a brain-computer interface, or a BCI. A BCI is a system that decodes neural signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. Perhaps the best-known company in the field is Neuralink, which is owned by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Other companies like Synchron and Paradromics have also developed BCI systems, though their goals and designs all vary. The first application of Precision’s system will be to help patients with severe paralysis restore functions like speech and movement, according to its website.
Stephanie Rider of Precision Neuroscience inspects the company’s microelectrode array
Source: Precision Neuroscience
Precision’s flagship BCI is called the Layer 7 Cortical Interface. It’s a microelectrode array that’s thinner than a human hair, and it resembles a piece of yellow scotch tape. Each array is made up of 1,024 electrodes, and Precision says it can conform to the brain’s surface without damaging any tissue.
When Bederson used four of the company’s arrays during the surgery in April, he set a record for the highest number of electrodes to be placed on the brain in real-time, according to Precision. But perhaps more importantly, the arrays were able to detect signals from the patient’s individual fingers, which is a far greater amount of detail than standard electrodes are able to capture.
Using Precision’s electrode array is like turning a pixilated, low-resolution image into a 4K image, said Ignacio Saez, an associate professor of neuroscience, neurosurgery and neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Saez and his team oversee Precision’s work with Mount Sinai.
“Instead of having 10 electrodes, you’re giving me 1,000 electrodes,” Saez told CNBC in an interview. “The depth and the resolution and the detail that you’re going to get are completely different, even though they somehow reflect the same underlying neurological activity.”
Bederson said accessing this level of detail could help doctors be more delicate with their surgeries and other interventions in the future. For Precision, the ability to record and decode signals from individual fingers will be crucial as the company works to eventually help patients restore fine motor control.
The data marks a milestone for Precision, but there’s a long road ahead before it achieves some of its loftier goals. The company is still working toward approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and it has yet to implant a patient with a more permanent version of its technology.
“I think these are little baby steps towards the ultimate goal of brain-computer interface,” Bederson told CNBC in an interview.
Inside the operating room
Dr. Joshua Bederson prepares for surgery at The Mount Sinai Hospital.
Ashley Capoot
Bederson’s surgery in April was not Precision’s first rodeo. In fact, it marked the 14th time that the company has placed its array on a human patient’s brain.
Precision has been partnering with academic medical centers and health systems to perform a series of first-in-human clinical studies. The goal of each study varies, and the company announced its collaboration with Mount Sinai in March.
At Mount Sinai, Precision is exploring different applications for its array in clinical settings, like how it can be used to help monitor the brain during surgery. In these procedures, surgeons like Bederson temporarily place Precision’s array onto patients who are already undergoing brain surgery for a medical reason.
Patients give their consent to participate beforehand.
It’s routine for neurosurgeons to map brain signals with electrodes during these types of procedures. Bederson said the current accepted practice is to use anywhere between four to almost 100 electrodes – a far cry from the 4,096 electrodes he was preparing to test.
Electrode arrays from Precision Neuroscience displayed on a table.
Ashley Capoot
Precision’s arrays are in use for a short portion of these surgeries, so CNBC joined the operating room in April once the procedure was already underway.
The patient, who asked to remain anonymous, was asleep. Bederson’s team had already removed part of their skull, which left an opening about the size of a credit card. Four of Precision’s arrays were carefully laid out on a table nearby.
Once the patient was stabilized, Precision’s employees trickled into the operating room. They helped affix the arrays in an arc around the opening on the patient’s head, and connected bundles of long blue wires at the other end to a cart full of equipment and monitors.
Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, Precision’s co-founder and chief scientific officer, quietly looked on. Every major procedure presents some risks, but the soft-spoken neurosurgeon’s calm demeanor never wavered. He told CNBC that each new case is just as exciting as the last, especially since the company is still learning.
Experts help set up the wiring for Precision Neuroscience’s technology.
Ashley Capoot
Bederson entered the operating room as Precision’s preparations neared their end. He helped make some final tweaks to the set up, and the overhead lights in the operating room were turned off.
Ongoing chatter quieted to hushed whispers. Bederson was ready to get started.
He began by carefully pulling back a fibrous membrane called the dura to reveal the surface of the brain. He laid a standard strip of electrodes onto the tissue for a few minutes, and then it was time to test Precision’s technology.
Using a pair of yellow tweezers called long bayonet forceps, Bederson began placing all four of Precision’s electrode arrays onto the patient’s brain. He positioned the first two arrays with ease, but the last two proved slightly more challenging.
Bederson was working with a small section of brain tissue, which meant the arrays needed to be angled just right to lay flat. For reference, imagine arranging the ends of four separate tape measures within a surface area roughly the size of a rubber band. It took a little reconfiguring, but after a couple of minutes, Bederson made it happen.
Real-time renderings of the patient’s brain activity swept across Precision’s monitors in the operating room. All four arrays were working.
In an interview after the surgery, Bederson said it was “complicated” and “a little bit awkward” to place all four arrays at once. From a design perspective, he said two arrays with twice as many points of contact, or longer arrays with greater spacing would have been helpful.
Bederson compared the arrays to spaghetti, and the description was apt. From where CNBC was watching, it was hard to tell where one stopped and the next began.
Once all the arrays were placed and actively detecting signals, Precision’s Rapoport stood with his team by the monitors to help oversee data collection. He said the research is the product of a true team effort from the company, the health system and the patient, who often doesn’t get to see the benefits of the technology at this stage.
“It takes a village to make this sort of thing move forward,” Rapoport said.
CNBC left the operating room as Bederson began removing the tumor, but he said the case went well. The patient woke up afterward with some weakness in their foot since the surgery was within that part of the brain, but Bederson said he expected the foot would recover in around three to four weeks.
Employees from Precision Neuroscience collecting data.
Ashley Capoot
Rapoport was present at this particular surgery because of his role with Precision, but he’s well acquainted with the operating rooms at Mount Sinai.
Rapoport is a practicing surgeon and serves as an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Rapoport reports to Bederson, and Bederson said the pair have known one another since Rapoport was in residency at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Dr. Thomas Oxley, the CEO of the competing BCI company Synchron, is also a faculty member under Bederson. Synchron has built a stent-like BCI that can be inserted through a patient’s blood vessels. As of early February, the company had implanted its system into 10 human patients. It is also working toward FDA approval.
Bederson has an equity stake in Synchron, but he told CNBC he didn’t realize how much it would prevent him from participating in research with the Synchron team. He has no monetary investment in Precision.
“I really did not want to have any financial interest in Precision because I think it has an equally promising future and wanted to advance the science as fast as I could,” Bederson said.
Rapoport also helped co-found Musk’s Neuralink in 2017, though he departed the company the following year. Neuralink is building a BCI designed to be inserted directly into the brain tissue, and the company recently received approval to implant its second human patient, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
As the BCI industry heats up, Bederson said the amount that scientists understand about the brain is poised to “explode” over the next several years. Companies like Precision are just getting started.
Dr. Joshua Bederson helps set up Precision Neuroscience’s electrode arrays.
Ashley Capoot
“I really feel like the future is where the excitement is,” Bederson said.
Rapoport said Precision is hoping to receive FDA approval for the wired version of its system “within a few months.” This version, which is what CNBC saw in the operating room, would be for use in a hospital setting or monitored care unit for up to 30 days at a time, he said.
Precision’s permanent implant, which will transmit signals wirelessly, will go through a separate approval process with the FDA.
Rapoport said Precision hopes to implant “a few dozen” patients with the wired version of its technology by the end of the year. That data collection would give the company a “very high level of confidence” in its ability to decode movement and speech signals in real-time, he said.
“Within a few years, we’ll have a much more advanced version of the technology out,” Rapoport said.
Whether to buy cryptocurrency as a long-term holding may be the biggest decision an investor interested in digital assets has to make, but where to store crypto like bitcoin can become the most consequential.
Following the wildfires earlier this year in California, social media posts began to appear with claims of bitcoin losses, with some users showing metal plates intended to protect seed phrases burnt up and illegible or describing the complexity of recovering crypto keys stored in a safety deposit box in a bank impacted by the fires. While impossible to verify individual claims about fires consuming hard drives, laptops and other storage devices containing so-called hard and cold storage crypto wallets and seed phrases, what is certain is that bitcoin self-custody presents a unique set of security issues. And those risks are growing.
Holders of crypto typically use some form of what can be called a “wallet,” and there are a few main features – whether that wallet is connected to the internet, and how much control is directly embedded in the wallet for trades and transfers. There is also the underlying issue of whether a crypto investor uses a third party for custody at all, or maintains total custody and trading control over their holdings.
The standard third-party platform “hot wallet” – think of an offering from a Coinbase or Blockchain.com – is constantly connected to the internet. Cold storage and “cold wallets,” on the other hand, include hardware devices (like a USB stick) that holds private keys offline, or even just a seed phrase (a master recovery code, a collection of 12 to 24 words used to recover access to a crypto wallet) on paper/metal. Hardware wallets or offline backups of seed phrases can be used to access crypto when connected to the internet through another device.
With third-party custodial options, there are steps to help owners remain vigilant against the threat posed by cybercriminals who can gain access to an internet-connected platform, including the use of two-factor authentication, and strong passwords. The U.S. Marshals Service within the Department of Justice, which is responsible for asset forfeiture from U.S. law enforcement, uses Coinbase Prime to provide custody for its seized digital assets.
Many crypto bulls prefer to self-custody digital assets like bitcoin for some of the same reasons they are interested in cryptocurrencies to begin with: lack of faith in some forms of institutional control. Custodial wallets from crypto brokers trade convenience for the risk of exchange hacks, shutdowns, or fraud, as in the case of the high-profile implosion of FTX. And the wildfires are just one example in a recent string of global events that raise more questions about shifts in the crypto custody debate. There is the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine war, which has led crypto bulls from overseas to re-think their approach to self-custody.
Nick Neuman, co-founder and CEO of self-custody company Casa, said physical risks in the world like a natural disaster are an opportunity to revisit how bitcoin security works, and the common security lapses folded into most peoples’ practices. “Most people secure their bitcoin with one private key. If that key is on a single device or written down on paper as a seed phrase, it’s a single point of failure. If you lose that key, your bitcoin is gone,” he said.
It should be obvious that keeping seed phrases on paper offers the lowest level of protection against fire, yet it is common practice, Neuman said. Slipping these pieces of paper into fireproof bags or safes offer some protection, but not much, and even going the extra steps to have the seed phrases on “indestructible” metal storage plates presents a few failure points. For one, they might prove to be not so indestructible, and second, they may be impossible to locate amid the rubble.
“Logically, given the location of the fires in California and the stories being shared on X, it’s highly likely bitcoin was lost,” said Neuman. “Some of them are pretty convincing,” he said.
Some self-custody services, like Casa, offer multi-signature setups that reduce the risks of single-point failure. A multi-key crypto “vault” can include mobile phone keys, multiple hardware keys, and a recovery key that a company likes Casa holds on an owner’s behalf.
The multi-sig custody approach allows an owner to hold a majority of keys while a trusted partner holds a minority of keys. John Haar, managing director at Swan Bitcoin, says that in such a setup, the owner would need to lose all the physical devices and all copies of the seed phrases at the same time. As long as the owner can access at least one device or one seed phrase, they would be able to recover their bitcoin. This approach should significantly limit the potential for all of the devices to be lost in an event like a natural disaster, Haar said.
“You can spread these keys across multiple regions or even countries, and you need any three of the five keys to approve a bitcoin transaction,” Neuman said of Casa’s five-key approach.
Jordan Baltazor, chief administrative officer at Fortress Trust, a regulated crypto custodian, says best practices that we use in other areas of personal life should apply to cryptocurrency. For one, diversification of storage approach and weighing of risks. Digital assets are no different, he says, when it comes to backing up personal and sensitive data on the cloud to ensure data against loss or corruption.
Companies including Coinbase and Jack Dorsey’s Block offer products that try to merge some of these ideas, creating a more secure version of a crypto wallet that remains convenient to use. There is Coinbase Vault, which includes enhanced security steps before a user can access crypto holdings for trading. And there is Coinbase Wallet and Block’s Bitkey, which have mobile apps that work like a traditional wallet making moving bitcoin around easy, but with the ability to pair with hardware wallets and added security more commonly associated with cold storage.
Bitkey hardware requires multiple authorizations for transactions for added security, similar to “multi-sig wallets.” Bitkey also offers recovery tools so one of the biggest risks of self-custody — losing codes or phrases needed to recover a cold wallet — is less of an issue.
Solutions like Dorsey’s may help to solve the tension between convenience and security; at minimum, they underline that this tension exists and will likely be something of a roadblock to more widespread crypto adoption. Beyond the risks out there in the form of wildfires, all kinds of natural disasters, and wars, bitcoin self-custody can be vulnerable to the biggest personal risk of all: unexpected death of the bitcoin owner. There is arguably nothing more complicated than inheritance when it comes to unlocking the crypto chain of custody.
Coinbase requires probate court documents and specific will designations before releasing funds from custody, while physical wallets offer little to no support, potentially leaving all that digital value stuck on a private key. Bitkey rolled out its inheritance solution in February for what a Bitkey executive called, “kind of a multibillion-dollar problem waiting to happen.”
“People who have a material investment in bitcoin absolutely need to be thinking differently about how to protect it,” Neuman said. He says that after disasters like the California wildfires, or when exchanges go bust like FTX, the industry does see more crypto holders taking action to move to more secure storage setups. “I suppose it’s human nature to wait until ‘bad things happen’ to spur action to improve your own personal situation,” he said. “But I think people would be better off if they were more proactive. Otherwise, they risk having that ‘bad thing’ happen to them, and then it’s too late,” he said.
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Elon Musk has been promising investors for about a decade that Tesla’s cars are on the verge of turning into robotaxis, capable of driving themselves cross-country, after one big software update.
That hasn’t happened yet.
What Tesla offers is a sophisticated, but only partially automated, driving system that’s marketed in the U.S. as its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option, though many Tesla fans refer to it as FSD. In China, Tesla recently changed the system’s name to “intelligent assisted driving.”
Full Self-Driving, as it was previously called, relies on cameras and software to enable features like automatic navigation on highways and city streets, or automatic braking and slowing in response to traffic lights and stop signs.
Tesla owner’s manuals warn users that FSD “is a hands-on feature” that requires them to pay attention to the road at all times. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic,” the manuals say.
But many of Tesla’s customers ignore the fine print and use the system hands-free anyway.
Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have been a source of inspiration for its stalwart fans. But they’ve also caused controversy and concern for public safety after reports of injurious and fatal collisions where Tesla’s standard Autopilot or premium FSD systems were known to be in use.
FSD does a lot of things “amazingly well,” said Guy Mangiamele, a professional test driver for automotive consulting firm AMCI Testing, during a recent long drive in Los Angeles. But he added that “the times that it trips up, you could kill somebody or you could hurt yourself.”
The pressure has never been higher on Tesla to elevate the technology and deliver on Musk’s long-delayed promises.
The Tesla CEO is the wealthiest person in the world and was the biggest financial backer of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Since Trump’s January inauguration, Musk has been leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to drastically slash the federal workforce and government spending.
The DOGE team has been connected to more than 280,000 layoff plans for federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies over the last two months, according to data tracked by Challenger Gray, the executive outplacement firm.
Musk’s work with DOGE – along with his frequently incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD – has led to a tremendous backlash against Tesla.
Protests, boycotts and even criminal acts of vandalism have targeted the electric vehicle maker in recent months and led many prospective Tesla customers to turn to other brands. Meanwhile, existing Tesla owners have been trading in their EVs at record levels, according to data from Edmunds.
Tesla’s stock dropped 36% through the first three months of 2025, representing its steepest decline since 2022 and third-biggest slide for any quarter since the EV maker went public in June 2010. Tesla also reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from the same period a year ago.
Product unveilings and a “robotaxi launch” expected from Tesla in Austin, Texas, this year could revitalize investors’ sentiment about the company and hopefully lift its share price, Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note following the worse-than-expected deliveries report.
On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk promised investors that Tesla will finally start its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin in June.
To see whether the company’s FSD technology is anywhere close to a robotaxi-ready release, CNBC spent months riding along with Tesla owners who use Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and speaking with automotive safety experts about their impressions.
Auto-tech enthusiast and Tesla owner Chris Lee, host of the YouTube channel EverydayChris, told CNBC that Tesla’s system “definitely has a ways to go, but the fact that it’s able to go from where it was three years ago to today, is insane.”
Many experts, including Telemetry Vice President of Market Research Sam Abuelsamid, remain skeptical. There’s been “no evidence” that FSD is “anywhere close to being ready to be used in an unsupervised form” by June, said Abuelsamid, whose firms specializes in automotive intelligence.
Tesla FSD will “often work really well, particularly in daytime conditions” but then “randomly, in a scenario where it did fine previously, it will fail,” said Abuelsamid, adding that those scenarios can be unpredictable and dangerous.
Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and whether it will be robotaxi-ready this June.