Elon Musk has made an unusual offer to Wikipedia, pledging to donate a billion dollars if the free information website agrees to change its name.
Asking Wikipedia and its co-founder Jimmy Wales to change the name to 'Dickipedia', the Tesla chief executive officer's proposition was shared on social media.
In the interests of accuracy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2023
He followed up the offer by asking if the website could “please add that to the [cow and poop emojis] on my wiki page", before claiming it was "in the interests of accuracy".
(Please add that to the ???????? on my wiki page)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2023
Musk's challenge arose from his criticism of the Wikimedia Foundation's funding requests, questioning the necessity of such funds for an information platform.
Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money?
It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone!
So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 22, 2023
Although the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, was quickly alerted to the reason for Wikipedia’s funding request via community notes attached below one of his tweets.
It read: “Wikipedia handles over 25B page views per month and over 44M page edits a month, requiring substantial operating costs.”
Before being deleted, the note also added how Wikipedia employs a third party auditor to produce a report for the organisation, which is then make available to the public.
Previously, Musk faced criticism from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales for content restrictions on his social media platform, X.
This latest move reignites talk of Musk's idea from 2018 of creating a website called Pravda, allowing the public to assess the credibility of articles and journalists.