Elon Musk promises to do to Wikipedia what he did to the federal government

Wikipedia is one of the 10 most popular websites on planet Earth and, in this reporter’s opinion, one of humanity’s greatest modern achievements of the digital age. It’s the closest we’ve gotten to making all the world’s information freely available to all, the result of armies of volunteers constructing an incredibly robust architecture for knowledge. Many have tried to build universal online encyclopedias to rival it, and none have come close. It is, as much as anything else on the internet, sui generis. And, annoyingly to certain acquisitive billionaires, it’s not for sale.

So of course Elon Musk says he’s going to build his own, calling it “a necessary step towards…understanding the Universe.”

We are building Grokipedia @xAI.

Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia.

Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe. https://t.co/xvSeWkpALy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2025

In June, Musk raised eyebrows by promising to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors,” using his Grok AI. That’s the same one with a nasty habit of heil-Hitlering.

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2025

I assume Musk will get around to Grokipedia right after he finishes saving the news industry with micropayments, which has been overdue since May 2023.

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