Musk's Grokipedia Drops: The Internet's New Knowledge Showdown

The Encyclopedia Nobody Asked For (But Everyone’s Talking About)

On October 27, 2025, Elon Musk rolled out Grokipedia an AI-powered encyclopedia he’s billing as Wikipedia’s superior replacement. The launch immediately triggered a firestorm over accuracy, political slant, and who gets to control what we know online.

Grokipedia debuted with 885,000 articles (Wikipedia has nearly 8 million in English alone). The site promptly face-planted under traffic before getting back on its feet.

How We Got Here

This whole thing started on the All-In Podcast in September 2025. Host David Sacks now the Trump administration’s AI and crypto czar pitched the idea of turning xAI’s knowledge base into “Grokipedia.” He trashed Wikipedia as hopelessly biased, and Musk jumped on board.

Musk announced the project would “purge out the propaganda” from online knowledge. After a brief delay to fix content issues, the beta launched on October 27.

From Fan to Foe

Musk’s Wikipedia relationship went south fast. In January 2021, he tweeted birthday wishes to the platform. By 2022, he claimed it was “losing its objectivity.”

Things escalated in 2023 when he offered Wikipedia $1 billion to rebrand as “Dickipedia” (seriously). He started pushing X’s Community Notes as more trustworthy.

By December 2024, Musk called for a donation boycott over alleged left-wing bias, dubbing it “Wokepedia.” In January 2025, he went after Wikipedia for describing a hand gesture he made at Trump’s inauguration one many saw as resembling a Nazi salute.

The Wikipedia Problem (It’s Awkward)

Here’s the kicker: Grokipedia copies Wikipedia. Extensively.

The Verge found articles for MacBook Air, PlayStation 5, and Lincoln Mark VIII that were word-for-word identical to Wikipedia, complete with disclaimers about being “adapted from Wikipedia” under Creative Commons licensing.

When called out on X, Musk replied, “I know. We should have this fixed by end of year.”

Lauren Dickinson from the Wikimedia Foundation nailed it: “Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”

Where Things Get Sketchy

The real controversy centers on how Grokipedia handles hot-button topics.

Climate Change

Wikipedia: “There is a nearly unanimous scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that this is caused by human activities.”

Grokipedia: Suggests “claims of near-unanimous scientific consensus” are overstated and that media organizations like Greenpeace contribute to “heightened public alarm” through “coordinated efforts to frame the issue as an existential imperative.”

Nick Fuentes

Wikipedia: “American far-right political commentator” whose “views have been described as racist, white supremacist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, and Islamophobic” and “has been described as a neo-Nazi and a Holocaust denier.”

Grokipedia: “American political commentator, live streamer, and activist” who “advocates for policies centered on national sovereignty” and is “a self-professed traditional Catholic.” Zero mention of the harsh descriptors.

The Great Replacement

Wikipedia: “A debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory” rooted in “an unscientific, racist worldview.”

Grokipedia: Presents it as “The Great Replacement theory” (no “conspiracy”), treating it as legitimate demographic analysis using UN projections.

Greta Thunberg

Wikipedia: “Swedish activist best known for pressuring governments to address climate change.”

Grokipedia: Highlights her autism diagnosis and claims her “promotion of urgent, existential climate threats has drawn scrutiny for diverging from nuanced empirical assessments.”

The Smoking Gun

The Decoder dug into Grokipedia’s entry on Germany’s AfD party and found something revealing: words like “anti-Semitism,” “racist,” and “racism” were missing, despite courts and government agencies documenting these issues.

The twist? When they tested the underlying Grok-4 model directly, it generated balanced, critical responses including terms like “antisemitism” and “far-right” even without Wikipedia as a source. These terms only vanished within Grokipedia itself.

A leftover line in one article exposed the game: “No, wait, avoid Wiki.”

The conclusion: “This points to a deliberate system-level prompt designed to downplay language and shift emphasis.”

How It Works (Sort Of)

Grokipedia looks like Wikipedia search bar, headings, citations. But photos are mostly absent.

Unlike Wikipedia’s open editing, Grokipedia’s edit button only shows completed changes without attribution. Users can’t suggest edits themselves.

Each article claims to be “fact-checked” by Grok, which is problematic since large language models are notorious for generating false information (hallucinations).

Musk says it’s “fully open source” and free to use, but as of October 29, 2025, no public source code repository exists.

The Musk Article (Of Course)

Grokipedia’s Musk entry is a masterclass in self-flattery.

Time magazine noted it “describes him in rapturous terms while downplaying, or even omitting, several of his controversies.” It includes personal details like his 80-100 hour work weeks and 20-pound weight loss through intermittent fasting.

Unlike Wikipedia, it skips the controversial January 2025 hand gesture. Where Wikipedia details Musk’s “feud with Donald Trump” including Epstein references, Grokipedia mentions only a “public disagreement” on policy.

The Media Claps Back

When Gizmodo asked xAI for comment, the company’s auto-reply said: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Musk posted on X: “Wired, The Atlantic, Guardian and many other propaganda legacy publications would die immediately if they had to support themselves.”

Wired ran “Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points.” The Washington Post highlighted right-leaning perspectives. Rolling Stone said it “whitewashes extremism.”

What the Experts Say

Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder and critic: “The jury’s still out as to whether it’s actually better than Wikipedia. But at this point I would have to say ‘maybe!'” (Though he noted hallucinations and errors.)

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s other co-founder: Large language models will cause “massive” errors.

Sociologist Taha Yasseri: Grokipedia may display biases like Wikipedia, but Wikipedia’s “infrastructure is designed to make that bias visible and correctable.”

The Bigger Picture

Grokipedia fits Musk’s expanding right-wing media ecosystem. On X, he’s restored numerous right-wing influencers and regularly shapes political narratives.

David Sacks commented: “I hope Grokipedia challenges [Wikipedia’s dominant position] and is able to fix that.”

This isn’t new. Conservapedia launched in 2006 as a conservative Wikipedia alternative but lacks credibility due to extreme right-wing slant.

What’s Coming

The site crashed on launch day, highlighting scalability issues. At version 0.1, it’s early beta.

Musk promises version 1.0 will be “10X better” and claims: “The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Key missing pieces: sourcing transparency, verification processes, revision logs, talk pages, and community oversight.

The Stakes

This isn’t just another website. Encyclopedias feed AI models, shape search results, and influence public understanding. Control over these knowledge bases matters.

If Grokipedia gets integrated into search tools and AI assistants, it could shape how millions understand controversial topics potentially favoring particular ideological perspectives.

The Wikimedia Foundation emphasized: “Wikipedia’s nonprofit independence with no ads and no data-selling also sets it apart from for-profit alternatives.”

The Bottom Line

Grokipedia’s biggest challenge isn’t generating articles fast it’s building trust without the community oversight that made Wikipedia successful.

Whether it becomes a valuable alternative or another failed partisan encyclopedia remains to be seen. The coming months will reveal if the platform can balance speed with reliability, and if users will embrace an AI-generated knowledge base that reflects its creator’s worldview.

For now, Grokipedia represents the ongoing battle over truth, bias, and the future of online knowledge a battle that will shape how future generations access and understand information.