Fact Check: Don't fall for this story about Musk paying medical bills, arranging Neuralink brain implant for sick girl
Claim:
In March 2025, tech billionaire Elon Musk paid the medical bills of Lily Thompson, a 7-year-old with a rare neurological disorder, and also arranged for an experimental device produced by his company Neuralink to be implanted in the child's brain.
Rating:
In late March 2025, a rumor spread online that Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, paid for the medical bills of Lily Thompson, a 7-year-old girl who allegedly suffered from a rare neurological condition.
According to the rumor, Musk also arranged to have the girl's brain implanted with the experimental brain-computer interface device that Musk's company Neuralink produces, leading to her miraculous recovery.
Some (archived) social media posts (archived) about the rumor included an image that appeared to show Musk next to a child in a hospital bed and a caption reading:
When Elon Musk heard about 7-year-old Lily Thompson, a girl battling a rare neurological disorder that left her unable to walk, speak, or even breathe without assistance. She was facing astronomical costs and fading hope, Lily's family received an unexpected lifeline when Musk personally pledged to cover every penny of her care, including a pioneering surgery that could restore her chance at a normal childhood.
Lily's condition, a degenerative brain disorder diagnosed at age 3, had defied conventional treatments, leaving her parents desperate as medical bills soared past $2 million. Enter Elon Musk, who, after reading about her plight in a local news story, directed his Musk Foundation to intervene. He not only paid off the family's debts but funded an experimental procedure at a top California hospital, implanting a Neuralink chip to repair damaged neural connections. "No child should suffer when we have the tools to help," Musk reportedly told doctors, insisting on fast-tracking the effort to give Lily a fighting chance.
So before you key a random person's Tesla, or set fire to a Tesla dealership, or speak ill of the great Elon Musk. I ask you, what the hell did you do for Lily?
(Facebook page Just the Facts)
Other (archived) posts (archived) about the rumor consisted of the same image with a shorter caption reading, "Elon Musk covered all medical expenses and fully funded the surgery and Neural Chip implantation to save this poor little girl's life. Thank you, sir!" along with a link to an article on a website called News.Citestesitu.com that purported to give further details about Musk's interactions with the girl.
That article began:
Elon Musk, the billionaire trailblazer of Tesla and SpaceX, has touched hearts worldwide by stepping in to save a young girl's life, covering all her medical expenses and funding a groundbreaking Neuralink chip implantation. The story unfolded on March 22, 2025, when Musk learned of 7-year-old Lily Thompson, a girl battling a rare neurological disorder that left her unable to walk, speak, or even breathe without assistance. Facing astronomical costs and fading hope, Lily's family received an unexpected lifeline when Musk personally pledged to cover every penny of her care, including a pioneering surgery that could restore her chance at a normal childhood.
In short, there was no evidence that the story about Musk paying a child's medical bills and arranging for a Neuralink device to be implanted into her brain was anything but a fictional tale designed to garner clicks and shares. As a result, we've rated the claim false.
First, the timeline of events described in the News.Citestesitu.com article was impossible. According to it, Musk first learned of Thompson's plight on March 22, 2025 — only a day before the March 23 publication date of the article. The article claimed that Thompson had not only already undergone the implantation surgery by the time the article went live the following day, but also that she began to speak and walk "within days" after the surgery.
The article also referred to social media phenomena that did not occur in reality. Part of the article read, "Online, X erupted with praise, with users sharing Lily's before-and-after photos under hashtags like #MuskSaves and #NeuralinkMiracle, turning her story into a beacon of hope for families facing similar struggles."
A search (archived) on X for one of those hashtags, #MuskSaves, returned two results, neither of which related to the Thompson story in any way. A search (archived) for the hashtag #NeuralinkMiracle returned no results.
A Google search for the terms "Lily Thompson" and "Neuralink" also found no media coverage of the story, which would have made headlines if it were true.
In addition to the lack of any demonstrable evidence corroborating the details of the story, both the text of the article and the image of Musk next to the child in the hospital bed showed signs of being the products of artificial intelligence (AI) software.
The AI text detectors ZeroGPT and GPTZero both found a high probability that the text of the article was AI-generated. Likewise, the AI image detectors WasItAI and Decopy AI reported with high confidence that the image was the work of an AI program.
Human trials for the Neuralink device have been ongoing since early 2024, when doctors implanted the company's chip in the brain of an adult quadriplegic man. Although that patient has spoken positively of the implant, it did not restore his ability to use his limbs. In March 2025, the patient told the BBC that he hoped he might someday be able to control his wheelchair through the device, but that for the time being he largely used it to play computer games.
Musk announced in January 2025 that a total of three volunteer patients had so far undergone implantation of the chip and that he hoped the company would implant up to 30 more devices in human patients in 2025.
Although not all of the patients' identities were public at the time of this writing, there was no indication that any of them were children. According to Neuralink's website, patients interested in enrolling in future clinical trials must be legal adults:
(Neuralink)
We've previously investigated other fictional claims about Musk that appeared to be entirely or partially the product of AI software, such as a rumor that he saved the home of an elderly woman who had lived there for 70 years.
"Elon Musk Says a Third Patient Got a Neuralink Brain Implant. The Work Is Part of a Booming Field." AP News, 13 Jan. 2025, https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface-9dbc92206389f27fd032825cf1597ee5.
Esposito, Joey. "Watch out for This Story about Musk Once Saving the Home of an Elderly Woman." Snopes, 13 Mar. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/home-elderly-woman-musk/.
Kantrowitz, Alex. Full Q&A: Neuralink Patient Noland Arbaugh on His Injury, Selection, and Newfound Superpower. https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/full-q-and-a-neuralink-patient-noland. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.
Neuralink. "Neuralink — Pioneering Brain Computer Interfaces." Neuralink, https://neuralink.com/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.
---. "PRIME Study Progress Update — User Experience." Neuralink Blog, 8 May 2024, https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience/.
The Man with a Mind-Reading Chip in His Brain, Thanks to Elon Musk. 23 Mar. 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewk49j7j1po.
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