Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Validates Your Favorite Conspiracy Theories While Saying Good Things About Him

“Happy birthday, Wikipedia! I’m glad you exist.”

That’s what the billionaire wrote Elon Musk on X — then called Twitter — in January 2021, on the 20th anniversary of the release of the free online encyclopedia. Like so many others who regularly access the collaborative site—more than a billion a month—he apparently saw it as a free and invaluable tool, a noble endeavor that democratized human knowledge around the world, thanks to the tireless work of tens of thousands of volunteer editors and the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.

Last Monday, the 27th, however, Musk revealed the first version of an online encyclopedia that, according to him, was already better than Wikipedia and free of the site’s so-called “propaganda”. THE Grokipediamade up of around 900,000 articles written by AI, was developed by xAIcompany Muskusing your language model Grokintegrated into its social platform, X. And although many of the pages are literal copies of Wikipedia, there are notable changes in topics related to Muskhis enemies and allies, and his far-right policies.

How, then, Musk went from defending the internet’s leading reference resource to someone clumsily trying to destroy it?

Although Musk Even though he continued to share Wikipedia pages on social media after his 20th anniversary message to the site, his optimistic outlook on this vast information network would not last long. At the end of that same year, he complained that the article about him was “trash” and poorly edited. “’History is written by the winners’, except on Wikipedia, since their enemies are still alive and have a lot of free time”, he published at the time, repeating the joke every few months.

Then, Musk began accusing the site of ideological bias, stating in 2022 that it was “losing objectivity” and tagging Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Walesinsisting that the project was “excessively controlled by the mainstream media”. (The press became an increasingly frequent target of the billionaire as he adopted more right-wing positions.) In 2023, after acquiring Twitter and launching it under the new brand X, Musk went on to promote the Community Notes resource as more trustworthy than Wikipedia, which he accused of having a “leftist editorial control problem.”

Ironically, a Community Note would eventually correct his false claim that the Wikimedia Foundation would not have significant operating expenses and therefore should be doing something else (possibly nefarious?) with user donations. In spreading this misinformation, Musk offered the nonprofit $1 billion if it would change the name “Wikipedia” to “Dickipedia” and adopt the additional moniker “Wokipedia,” tying the site to his idea of ​​a sinister “woke mental virus.”

In 2024, while Musk put all his influence and financial power behind the presidential campaign of donald trumpwas furious with the way the media and Wikipedia challenged the movement’s misleading messages and falsehoods MAGAarguing, shortly before the election, that the encyclopedia had been “taken over by left-wing activists.” He also said the site was “broken” because it had a page dedicated to the academic debate about whether Trump could be considered fascist. Musk was similarly angered in January of this year, when Wikipedia accurately recorded that a gesture he made at an inauguration event had been interpreted by many as a Nazi salute — something he denied was his intention.

These accumulated discontents led to the creation of Grokipedia as a “recalibrated” and competing version of Wikipedia — something evident just by looking at its endless about page Elon Musk: there is no mention of the salute given on the day of the inauguration, nor of its similarity to a notorious fascist gesture. Instead, readers of Grokipedia find laudatory, if questionable, tidbits about the man whose company built the site — including that he reportedly works “80 to 100 hours a week” and has lost 20 pounds with intermittent fasting. Other embarrassing episodes are downplayed: while Wikipedia devotes a section of its article to Musk to his confusing “feud with donald trump” last spring — including the detail that Musk mentioned Trump’s ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein —, the Grokipedia makes only a passing mention of a “public disagreement” with Trumpin “policy issues”.

Meanwhile, right-wing commentators were elated to see how the Grokipedia softened extremism, noting that it does not describe the Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a conspiracy theorist or anti-vaccine activist, as Wikipedia does in its first paragraph about him. Going a little further, it is noted that, while the Wikipedia page on “Anti-vaccine activism” includes at the outset an acknowledgment of the misinformation that drives the movement, the page on Grokipedia titled “Vaccine Opposition Activism” is significantly milder, limiting itself to noting that its advocates are sometimes criticized for distorting data.

Conspiracy theories themselves are also given a little more credibility in Grokipedia. Consider the article about the Pizzagatea widely debunked false story about an alleged child sex trafficking ring run by liberal elites in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. Even far-right influencers known for spreading this misinformation for nearly a decade — including Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec — have already abandoned this absurd idea. Still, the Grokipedia describes the Pizzagate as a series of “claims”, a “hypothesis” and a “narrative”. The phrase “conspiracy theory” only appears in the 35th paragraph, after long sections on the interpretation of leaked emails from prominent Democrats as coded messages and the emergence of “symbolic evidence.” It’s no surprise that pages dedicated to Posobiec and Cernovich do not identify them as conspiracy theorists, just mention that they were characterized as such by the mainstream media and “left-leaning outlets”.

The fingerprints of Musk appear throughout the sections of the Grokipedia that address topics linked to their own hurts. He has been criticizing the billionaire for years George Soros as a “puppeteer” of progressive activism, and while Wikipedia describes these views as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the Grokipedia brings a page titled “Theories about the influence of George Soros”. Musk also endorsed, albeit indirectly, the racist conspiracy theory of “Big Replacement”, which falsely claims that liberal elites are trying to weaken the majority white populations in Western countries through immigration; the Grokipedianaturally, treats the idea as valid and supported by empirical evidence, dismissing its obvious links to white nationalist ideology as mere rhetorical attacks from the press.

Naturally, the reactionary stances of Musk on gender and sexuality are also in evidence. The word “cisgender” — a neutral term that complements “transgender” — “pathologizes normality,” according to critics, claims the Grokipedia. The source of this claim is a website called New Discoursesfounded by author and far-right activist James Lindsaywhich vilified LGBTQ people as “groomers” trying to indoctrinate children into the queer community. At another point, the “transgender” page speculates at length whether people are transitioning mainly because of “social contamination”, that is, exposure to other trans people in real life and on the internet. Actual scientific evidence, however, indicates that there is no such effect.

But having concrete facts to support inflamed beliefs is far from the purpose of Grokipedia — a platform made only to appear authoritative for its own sake. With its AI-based model, it also seeks to reinforce the common (and mistaken) assumption that chatbots provide objective, infallible truths on command. Make no mistake: unlike Wikipedia articles, the hundreds of thousands of pages on Grokipedia they do not represent any human effort to arrive at a consensual version of reality. They are words extracted from the internet, reorganized, revised and intertwined with the most toxic parts of the worldview of Musk.

Text published on the website Rolling Stone in October 2025. Read here.

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