Recommendations of the Editorial team
“Happy birthday, Wikipedia! I’m so glad you exist,” wrote Elon Musk on Twitter (now X) in January 2021 on the occasion of the online encyclopedia’s 20th anniversary. At the time, he sounded like a staunch supporter of one of the largest free knowledge projects in the world.
But just a few years later, the same man presented his own version: Grokipedia – an AI project developed by Musk’s company xAI that includes approximately 900,000 items. It is based on Musk’s large language model Grok, which is integrated into his Platform X.
An attack on the principle of free knowledge
According to Musk, Grokipedia is intended to be a “better, unbiased” alternative to Wikipedia – one that is “freed from propaganda”. But even a quick look at the content shows that many pages have been copied verbatim from Wikipedia, while central topics affecting Musk himself appear altered or distorted.
For example, his own biography is rewritten into a brilliant self-portrait. Critical aspects – such as the controversy surrounding a gesture interpreted as a Nazi salute – are completely missing. Instead, there are dubious myths about his work discipline (“80 to 100 hours per week”) and eating habits.
From supporter to enemy of Wikipedia
Musk initially praised Wikipedia as an “irreplaceable tool”. But his complaints began at the end of 2021: the article about him was a “dumpster fire” written by enemies. In 2022, he accused the platform of “left-wing bias” and being too close to the mainstream media.
With the acquisition of Twitter in 2023 and the introduction of Community Notes, he finally stylized his own network as “more reliable than Wikipedia”. At the same time, he spread false claims about the Wikimedia Foundation – for example, that it had “hardly any operating costs” and misused donations.
Musk took his hostility to grotesque heights when he publicly offered Wikipedia a billion dollars on the condition that it change its name to “Dickipedia.” At the same time, he mockingly defamed the platform as “Wokipedia” – based on his ideological enemy image of the “woke mind virus”.
When Musk openly supported Donald Trump in 2024, the situation escalated. He accused Wikipedia of promoting “left-wing activists” and opposing right-wing disinformation. He was particularly enraged by one site that dealt with the question of whether Trump could be called a fascist.
Grokipedia: AI with a right-wing list
Grokipedia now stands as a technical product of this feud – a digital monument to his ego. Even at first glance, it is noticeable that topics that trigger Musk ideologically have been systematically rewritten.
Examples:
- Pizzagate is no longer presented as a hoax, but as a “hypothesis.”
- Anti-vaccine activism appears not as a disinformation movement but as a legitimate controversy.
- Right-wing extremist influencers like Jack Posobiec or Mike Cernovich are no longer referred to as conspiracy theorists, but simply as people “called that way by the mainstream media.”
Musk resorts to well-known conspiracy narratives in Grokipedia:
- The influence of Jewish investor George Soros is treated as a “theory,” not an anti-Semitic construct.
- The racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy appears to be a supposedly “empirically supported idea.”
- The word “cisgender” has been referred to as “pathologizing language,” with sources from right-wing extremist forums.
- The page about “transgender” also speculates that gender identities arise through “social contagion” – a thesis that has long been scientifically refuted.
Grokipedia is less a knowledge project than an instrument of political manipulation. It is intended to create the appearance of objective information while systematically reinforcing an authoritarian worldview.
In contrast to Wikipedia, which works through consensus, source checking and human moderation, Grokipedia is based on an automated replica of reality, filtered through Musk’s personal enemy images.
What is sold as a “revolution of truth” is ultimately the algorithmic distortion of reality.
A dangerous precedent
Grokipedia exemplifies a new chapter in the digital age: the ideological colonization of knowledge through AI. When powerful actors begin to rewrite information systems at will, the line between reality, opinion and power becomes blurred.
Elon Musk has thus transformed himself from a supporter of free information to an architect of digital manipulation – with a project that promises less enlightenment than control.