Elon Musk offers $1 billion to Wikipedia if it changes its name

Billionaire Elon Musk offered Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, $1 billion on the condition that it change 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. I had previously posted a screenshot of a personal appeal from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stating that the website is “not for sale”.

“I’ll give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” Musk said he wrote.

“Please add this to [cow and poop emojis] on my wiki page,” he continued in another post. “In the interest of accuracy.”

When a user, journalist Ed Krassenstein, suggested the online encyclopedia take the dealsaying it “can always be changed back after pickup,” Musk added a condition to his offer.

“Minimum of one year. I mean, I’m not a fool lol,” he wrote.

Musk had made several posts earlier Sunday criticizing the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, for asking for money.

“Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It’s certainly not necessary to operate Wikipedia,” he wrote to X. “You can literally put a copy of the entire text on your phone! So what is the money for? Inquiring minds want to know…”

The app’s “Community Notes,” which allows users to sign up to be contributors and create notes on posts to contextualize them, he left an explanation under its publication, it initially stated that Wikipedia handles “more than 25 million page views per month and more than 44 million page edits per month, which require substantial operating costs.”

He also noted that the organization has third-party financial auditors whose reports are made available to the public.

The memo has since been updated to list the organization’s expenditures, $146 million, and leave a bulleted list specifying where the money is going by percentage.

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 in the Turkish Supreme Court and won,” Wales said. he wrote in response ah Musk post defending his decision. “This is what it means to treat free speech as a principle rather than a slogan.”

Musk has come under heavy criticism in some quarters for misinformation about X since he bought the platform and introduced a series of changes.