Elon Musk renews Wikipedia feud, pitches xAI's Grokipedia as massive improvement

Elon Musk has announced the creation of a new knowledge resource he calls “Grokipedia.” The tech giant has said that it will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia.

Grokipedia will be built using Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI. In an X post, Musk said, “Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”

Musk previously stated that xAI is already incorporating tools into its Grok chatbot that will automatically identify mistakes in online content and rewrite them into more accurate entries. 

According to the tech billionaire, Grok’s “synthetic corrections” could become the foundation for an alternative database to Wikipedia, one designed to strip out errors, omissions, and what he views as ideological bias.

If realized, Grokipedia would represent one of the most direct challenges yet to the world’s largest crowdsourced encyclopedia.

David Sacks encourages Musk to rewrite Wikipedia

Musk brought up Grokipedia again after David Sack proposed a new market opportunity for artificial intelligence to rewrite Wikipedia by integrating previously banned sources.

According to Sacks, “Wikipedia is hopelessly biased. An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fights reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”

Sacks’ suggestion was motivated by an interview with Tucker Carlson, where Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger guided him through the site’s blacklist. “Red means it’s blacklisted,” he said. “You cannot cite it as a source of facts, maybe as a source of opinion, but generally that works out.”

According to Sanger, using public discussion and consensus, Wikipedia has a page called Perennial Sources that sorts sources into groups based on how reliable they are said to be. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Nation, Mother Jones, and GLAAD are among the publications that have Wikipedia’s approval.

On the other hand, the blacklisted sources include Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, The Epoch Times, Fox News, The New York Post, and The Federalist. “So, you can’t use those as sources on Wikipedia,” Sanger said.

However, AI is likely to have some challenges. A 2024 study showed chatbots deliver strong performance on simple fact-based queries but struggle with complex “why” and “how” questions. Problems included faulty reasoning, technical inaccuracies, and the inability to cite valid references.

Musk’s feud with Wikipedia

It’s not the first time Musk has criticized Wikipedia. After a disagreement over the term “recession” led to more than 180 edits in only one week in 2022, he went on to accuse the platform of bias.

A year down the road, he got into an online feud with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, over transparency and neutrality.

In October 2024, Musk promised to pay $1 billion to Wikipedia in exchange for changing its name to “Dickipedia.” In December 2024, he was already urging users to stop donating to the site after a far-right X account claimed that the Wikimedia Foundation devotes $50 million a year to diversity and inclusion projects.

The confrontation has escalated since Trump took office. Elon Musk renewed his feud with Wikipedia when the website included his gesture during Trump’s inauguration, which many have equated to the Nazi salute. 

While Musk was not formally accused of doing a Nazi salute, he did flag the organization as far-left, previously referring to it as “Wokepedia.” X Musk urged people to “defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!”

The way Musk’s biography is presented on Wikipedia has also been a point of public contention for the billionaire. Since he would rather have attention focused on his leadership positions, he once asked that editors remove the term “investor” from his page.

At the same time, using AI has caused some upheaval on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation stopped experimenting with AI-generated summaries in June 2025 after editors strongly objected.

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