The billionaire previously proposed paying the website to change its name to “Dickipedia”
Elon Musk has confirmed that his offer to pay $1 billion for Wikipedia to change its name to “Dickipedia” is still on the table. The X owner initially made the proposal amid accusations that the encyclopedia has an embedded left-leaning bias.
On Tuesday, one X user recalled Musk’s offer, to which the billionaire replied “True. Offer still stands.”
Earlier this year, Musk claimed that Wikipedia was “broken” and urged to “fix Wokipedia” amid accusations that the website allows articles that brand Republicans and US President-elect Donald Trump as “fascist” and promote other left-wing narratives while painting the political right in a negative light. He claimed that the encyclopedia is “controlled by far-left activists” and urged people to stop donating to it.
Musk has also questioned why the Wikimedia Foundation has been asking for large amounts of money, arguing that “it certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia” because “you can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone.”
The website previously explained in a community note that while a text and English-only copy of Wikipedia was about 51GB, the entire encyclopedia, including all the media and other languages weighs some 428TB. The organization said that in 2022, Wikimedia generated $154 million in revenue and had $145 million in expenses.
In October, while posting a photo of Wikipedia’s donation plea, Musk wrote: “I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” and called it “a stiff & firm offer.”
Meanwhile, a study in June by the Manhattan Institute, a US-based conservative think tank, found that Wikipedia’s tendency to negatively portray right-wing political figures had started to affect AI large language models that harvest data from the online encyclopedia.
The report said that it had found “prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures; and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures,” suggesting “evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles.”
Last month, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also hit out against Wikipedia, claiming that the encyclopedia provided one-sided and often biased interpretations of events in its historical and political articles, which “almost always reflect and exclusively Western-centric point of view and contain direct forgeries.”
