Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk has a long-standing, highly public grievance with the iconic website Wikipedia.
As the New York Times reports, Musk announced the launch of a Wikipedia competitor on Oct. 27, one based on xAI's in-house chatbot, Grok.
What's happening?
Musk's high-profile disdain for Wikipedia goes back years.
In 2019, he implored his Twitter followers to remove the word "investor" from his profile, a characterization he claimed obscured his "fundamental founding role" in them.
More broadly, Wikipedia has been under constant attack in recent years, intensifying in 2025. In February, Slate reported that The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the controversial policy document known as Project 2025, planned to target and harass its editors.
In March, Columbia Journalism Review covered a coordinated effort to undermine Wikipedia, citing Musk's chagrin over his actions being documented in his entry as part of it.
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At the same time, Musk has been promoting X's AI chatbot Grok, despite its horrifying bouts of antisemitism. On Oct. 27, against a backdrop of rapidly dwindling press freedom in the United States, he tweeted that Grokipedia was "live."
As the Times observed, Musk's entry on Grokipedia described his public perception as a blend of "innovative visionary with irreverent provocateur."
Why is this concerning?
Self-serving flattery is one thing, but Wikipedia has been a Harvard-endorsed source of consistency amid ongoing, dangerous media consolidation and a flattened information landscape.
Musk's quarter-billion-dollar investment in the 2024 U.S. election was controversial, and similar concerns about purchasing influence arose when he launched Grokipedia.
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Absolutely 👍 University of Massachusetts Amherst research fellow Ryan McGrady talked to the Times about why the move was unsettling.
"The impulse to control knowledge is as old as knowledge itself. Controlling what gets written is a way to gain or keep power," he warned, before the paper listed off Grokipedia entries that aligned neatly with Musk's known views.
Although AI tools themselves have many useful applications, the companies behind them have not been at all transparent when it comes to their environmental impact.
External analysis has indicated AI data centers tax public resources, particularly electric energy and water, and emit significant amounts of carbon.
AI data centers have also been implicated in skyrocketing energy costs and electric bills across the United States.
What's being done about it?
As of Grokipedia's launch, the rival site had only a fraction of entries, 800,000 to Wikipedia's over 8 million.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales was unruffled by the competition from Grok and said he always sought ways to improve the online encyclopedia.
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