With Grokipedia, Elon Musk wants to bury Wikipedia and impose his version of the truth.

By launching Grokipedia, his “unbiased” encyclopedia intended to correct Wikipedia, which he considers too left leaning Elon Musk claims to be liberating knowledge from ideology.

However, behind the supposed neutrality of the artificial intelligence used to power the platform, a new political offensive is taking shape.

Wikipedia made knowledge a common good; Elon Musk wants to make it private property. The American billionaire, who has consistently accused Wikipedia of leaning too far to the left, launched his own online encyclopedia on Monday, October 27, which he claims will be more “objective.” Its name: Grokipedia.

While for almost 25 years Wikipedia has reigned as the largest collective library on the internet on which millions of internet users build, correct and debate common knowledge, for Elon Musk – and more broadly for American conservatives – this cathedral of knowledge is no longer a sanctuary of knowledge, but the bastion of a “woke” thought to be brought down.

The billionaire, a former close ally of Donald Trump, found the perfect solution: launch his own encyclopedia, “free from all bias,” he says, powered not by volunteers, but by artificial intelligence. As its name suggests, Elon Musk is entrusting Grok  the AI ​​integrated into the social network X – with the production of the knowledge available on Grokipedia.

By positioning itself as an alternative to Wikipedia, Grokipedia allows Elon Musk to extend his ambitions, by challenging the authority of collective knowledge, imposing a vertical technological model and redefining truth in light of artificial intelligence.

“A machine designed to discredit scientific and collaborative work”

In 2019, when Elon Musk criticized his own Wikipedia page, calling it “insanely inaccurate,” his criticism seemed anecdotal. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO primarily faulted the online encyclopedia for biographical inaccuracies, while already questioning the reliability of the collaborative model on which it is based.

Created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia was born with the utopian goal of a world “in which every person on the planet has free access to the sum total of all human knowledge”.

Contrary to this horizontal, collective and universal vision of knowledge, Elon Musk advocates a hierarchical, technological approach, where knowledge is no longer built in human dialogue, but is “purified” by calculation and algorithms.

In 2023, this divide became more direct when the billionaire publicly offered Wikipedia one billion dollars on the condition that it change its name to “Dickipedia.” Under the guise of humor—albeit a crude one Elon Musk declared war on the largest online encyclopedia, accusing it of “taking public money to fund ideological propaganda.”

A year later, on the social network X which he recently bought, he took a further step, asking his millions of subscribers to stop all donations to “Wokepedia”, outraged that the Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit association that hosts Wikipedia) had devoted, out of an annual budget of $177 million, nearly $50 million to diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

In the summer of 2025, six months after Donald Trump’s return to the White House and a presidential campaign during which he accused Wikipedia of misinformation and anti-conservative bias, Elon Musk announced the launch of his own encyclopedia, which he described as a “refuge from censorship and biased narratives.” In interviews, he openly discussed his ambition to “purify knowledge” through technology, in contrast to the “human chaos” of Wikipedia.

“It is a machine to discredit scientific and collaborative work which is always situated work, both geographically and in time, and above all open to modifications,” explains Anaïs Nony, a researcher at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies on the challenges of artificial intelligence and life.

More than just a simple ego war between a billionaire and an online encyclopedia, Grokipedia crystallizes the shift from collective knowledge to algorithmic knowledge, from a debated truth to a calculated truth.

The promise of “purified” knowledge

According to Elon Musk’s presentation, Grokipedia is not an encyclopedia like any other; it goes beyond simple rivalry with Wikipedia and has the mission of producing “pure” knowledge, objective, free from human passions and compromises.

However, explains Anaïs Nony, “rationality [reasoning capacity] is created precisely from our relationships, from the way we confront the reality of things and modify them as we go along, that’s why Wikipedia is an open system, while Musk’s proposal is closed, omnipotent, above the crowd, it is like a god.”

According to the Washington Post, several studies have examined potential political biases on Wikipedia. They find a slight leftward tendency, while others place it more in the center, within the context of American politics, and suggest that over time, articles become more neutral thanks to community revisions.

“It’s an encyclopedia that relies on underlying sources, is corrected in real time, and is constantly evolving, just like the sources,” Maryana Iskander, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, explained to the American daily newspaper. “Wikipedia is impartial if you understand how it works.”

When announcing the launch of Grokipedia, Elon Musk repeatedly stated, “AI doesn’t care about ideology, it cares about accuracy.” However, reminding us that the very nature of knowledge is that it is not neutral, Anaïs Nony clarifies that in the case of an online encyclopedia powered by artificial intelligence, the idea of ​​any kind of neutrality is entirely illusory.

“A technology carries within its creation the content of its creator. The design, deployment, and functionality of a technology themselves reflect the aspirations and values ​​of its creator. There is no neutral technology, just as there is no neutral science. It is always a bias.”

According to the philosopher, Elon Musk is proposing a platform that cannot be modified by peers, the antithesis of what constitutes knowledge.

 “The very foundation of knowledge is interpretation, dialogue with peers, confronting flawed results in order to arrive at better ones,” she explains. “Therefore, there is an ideology behind this, which is to place epistemology [the research and formation of knowledge] under algorithmic control. An algorithmic control that, itself and especially so is rooted in biases: of gender, class, race…”

Indeed, artificial intelligence systems are never neutral; they themselves reproduce the biases of the data on which they are trained. These sources, in Grok’s case, come primarily from X, and from a corpus that is ideologically biased.

“AI systems are neither autonomous, nor rational, nor capable of discerning anything without intensive training in computation with large datasets or predefined rules and rewards,” Australian researcher Kate Crawford stated in her book “Atlas of AI “(Yale University Press, 2021).

Neoliberal and colonial continuity

“Announcing that Wikipedia is ‘woke’ and ‘biased’ is an alibi,” argues Anaïs Nony. “It’s a way for them to saturate the accessibility [to information] that the masses crave in order to better promote neoliberal, highly patriarchal ideologies and to sow racial division, with a rewriting of history and sociology, but without the sociologists and historians.”

In other words, Elon Musk would be proposing more of a filtering of information than a cleaning of it, the machine then becoming a new invisible publisher, at the service of the vision of the world that he defends.

According to Wired , which had access to Grokipedia on Monday before access to the platform was restricted, “several notable entries denounced the mainstream media, promoted conservative viewpoints and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.”

The American magazine, which deals primarily with the impact of emerging technologies on culture, the economy, and politics, specifically mentions “Grokipedia’s page on the enslavement of African Americans, which included a section presenting numerous ideological justifications for slavery.”

Wired also recounts searching for “gay marriage” and finding that no page existed. Instead, an on-screen suggestion directed users to the “gay pornography” page, on which Grokipedia “claimed – incorrectly – that the proliferation of pornography exacerbated the HIV epidemic in the 1980s.”

Thus, Kate Crawford continued in her book, “artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much larger set of political and social structures. And because of the capital required to build large-scale AI and the ways of seeing that it optimizes, AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests.”

In the case of Grokipedia, “Elon Musk’s project is part of the neoliberal and colonial continuity of what had already begun with the Starlink satellites and later with the social network X (formerly Twitter),” analyzes Anaïs Nony. “The idea being, in one case, to secure a kind of hegemony of internet access on the planet in order to create dependency, and in the other, to create a machine to propel the Musk-Trump ideology.”

At a time when universities are accused by the techno-populist right of indoctrination, the media of “fake news,” scientific institutions of being “captured by wokism,” and now Wikipedia of being “ideological,” Grokipedia seems to be just another tool for controlling “truth and in this new era of algorithmic knowledge, knowledge is no longer shared, it is hoarded.

BY IHIRWE J. Christian