Elon Musk appears to have moved on from Twitter to Wikipedia. The eccentric millionaire has offered a billion bucks to everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia in exchange for altering its name to something NSFW. The Tesla CEO took to his social media site X, formerly Twitter, and generously donated Wikipedia a one billion dollar donation. However, the donation is far from charitable. The money comes with strings attached. On X, Musk stated that he “will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Di**ipedia.” He also re-shared a screenshot of a Wikipedia fundraising plea that declared, in bold letters, “Wikipedia is not for sale.”
Musk’s generous “donation” follows an earlier tweet where he slammed the Wikimedia Foundation for its appeals for donation
“Please add that to the [cow and poop emojis] on my wiki page,” he said in a comment on his post, adding “In the interests of accuracy.” That would appear to be a simple billion. Someone, predictably, recommended that Wikipedia get the money and change its name back. “Do it!” exclaimed Ed Krassenstein, a journalist based in the United States, encouraging Wikipedia to make the conversion. “You can always change it back after you collect.” Elon Musk responded, “One year at the very least.” I mean, I’m not an idiot.” So, if Wikipedia accepts Musk’s offer, the website will be stuck with the X-rated name for at least a year.
As per Complex, Musk’s generous “donation” follows an earlier tweet where he slammed the Wikimedia Foundation for its appeals for donation. He said that so much money “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 …,” he added.
Musk and Wikipedia have a history. In May, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales criticized Musk for caving into the Turkish government’s demands and censoring posts on X (formerly Twitter) before the country’s presidential election. “What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought the Supreme Court of Turkey and won. This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan,” he had said, replying to Musk’s post slamming Bloomberg columnist Matt Yglesias for posting about Musk’s compliance with the Turkish government’s censorship of opponents.