Elon Musk has long complained about Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia that’s considered a crown jewel of the internet. And now it seems like the billionaire is finally going to launch a competitor.
“We are building Grokipedia @xAI,” Musk tweeted Tuesday. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
The Tesla CEO has previously insisted that Wikipedia is too “woke” and wants to offer an alternative encyclopedia with more right-wing “facts” about the world. Musk has referred to Wikipedia as “Wokipedia” at least half a dozen times in recent years.
Musk, who spent over $270 million to get President Donald Trump elected, launched his artificial intelligence company xAI in 2023 and touts his AI chatbot Grok as a superior product. But Grok often presents facts about the world that Musk doesn’t agree with. And his attempts to tinker with Grok to become more right-wing have seen mixed success.
Two high-profile incidents with Grok were an embarrassment for Musk, including the time Grok randomly responded to queries with unrelated conspiracy theories about white farmers being murdered in South Africa. A couple of months later, Grok went full Nazi, praising Hitler and endorsing the idea of rounding up Jews in concentration camps.
Musk never took blame for making Grok so buggy, but both incidents came after the CEO complained on X that his AI chatbot wasn’t responding to factual questions the way that he wanted. And it seems likely that Grokipedia will almost certainly meet similar limitations.
Musk and xAI haven’t released any information about how Grokipedia will operate, including whether it will be 100% AI-generated content. It’s also unclear whether Grokipedia will have dedicated URLs for various topics that anyone can visit or if it will be some kind of modified version of Grok that spits out answers to various questions.
“Join @xAI and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia! This will be available to the public with no limits on use,” Musk tweeted.
Join @xai and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia!
This will be available to the public with no limits on use. https://t.co/3CnfrvNIpI
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2025
If the user interface is just a chatbot like Grok, it’s unclear how that would be different from the Grok that now exists. xAI didn’t respond to questions on Tuesday about how Grokipedia would work, nor when it would launch.
Musk also quote-tweeted Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, on Tuesday, who shared nine changes he wanted to see the dominant online encyclopedia adopt, including:
- End decision-making by “consensus”
- Enable competing articles
- Abolish source blacklists
- Revive the original neutrality policy
- Repeal “Ignore All Rules”
- Reveal who Wikipedia’s leaders are
- Let the public rate articles
- End permanent blocking
- Adopt a legislative process
Musk called them “good suggestions.” Sanger left Wikipedia back in 2002 and hasn’t had any formal involvement with it since. He’s been a critic of the project for decades and recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to whine about how it’s biased against conservatives.
The magic of Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute information, cite a source, and it’s policed by contributors and editors who mostly try to keep things as objective and factual as possible while citing reliable sources. Generative AI tools like Grok create sentences by relying on their training data, and it’s difficult to tinker with the weights to prioritize a right-wing view of the world without going full Nazi. We saw that play out in real-time twice now at scale, all thanks to Musk.
There are a lot of big questions that haven’t been answered about what Grokipedia will look like. But this wouldn’t be the first time conservatives have tried to launch their own Wikipedia competitor. Conservapedia was launched in 2006 and is widely regarded as a joke by anyone who tries to wade through its ridiculous articles.
Even Conservapedia’s right-wing bias doesn’t seem to treat Musk very well, as you can see from this excerpt taken from his page at the site:
Musk apparently does not hire conservatives in key positions, and is a cheerleader for giving foreigners top jobs in America. He wants expanded use of visas to import foreigners, and most of his Tesla cars are made in China. This is contrary to the America First position of MAGA supporters. Personally, Musk fathers many children without being a daily father to them.
No wonder Musk is trying to build his own Wikipedia. Even the right-wing copycats don’t cut him much slack. At least Conservapedia did him the favor of not mentioning those two Nazi-style salutes on the day Trump was inaugurated.
