Elon Musk offers $1B to Wikipedia if it changes its name
The Hill
RACHEL SCULLY
October 23, 2023 at 6:51 AM
Billionaire Elon Musk offered Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, $1 billion under the condition that it changes its name to “Dickipedia.”
The owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, wrote his offer in a post on his site. He had previously posted a screenshot of a personal appeal from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stating that the website is “not for sale.”
“I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” Musk wrote.
“Please add that to the [cow and poop emojis] on my wiki page,” he continued in another post. “In the interests of accuracy.”
When one user, journalist Ed Krassenstein, suggested the online encyclopedia take the deal, saying that it can “can always change it back after you collect,” Musk added a condition to his offer.
“One year minimum. I mean, I’m a not fool lol,” he wrote.
Musk had made multiple posts earlier Sunday criticizing the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, for asking for money.
“Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia,” he wrote on X. “You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone! So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know …”
The app’s “Community Notes,” which allows users to sign up to become contributors and create notes on posts for context, left an explanation under his post initially stating that Wikipedia handles “over 25B page views per month and over 44M page edits a month, requiring substantial operating costs.”
It also noted that the organization employs third-party financial auditors whose reports are made available to the public.
The note since updated and noted the organization’s expenses, $146 million, and left a bullet list specifying where the money goes by percent.
Wales has been an outspoken critic of Musk. In May, Wales condemned Musk’s decision to censor critics ahead of the Turkish presidential election.
“What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won,” Wales wrote in response to a post from Musk defending his decision. “This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan.”
Musk has come under withering criticism in some quarters for misinformation on X since he purchased the platform and instituted a number of changes.
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