"Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!" On January 21, Elon Musk lashed out at the participatory encyclopedia in a series of virulent messages posted on his social media platform, X. The reason for his wrath? The latest changes to his page on the English version of Wikipedia. It now said that, during his speech at Donald Trump's inauguration the previous day, Musk "extended his right arm out, emphatically, at an upward angle, palm down and fingers together. He then repeated the gesture to the crowd behind him." A gesture that was compared to a "Nazi salute," which Musk denied, "deriding the claims as being politicized."
The encyclopedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales replied the same day: "Is there anything you consider inaccurate in that description? It's true you did the gesture (twice) and that people did compare it to a Nazi salute (many people) and it's true that you denied it had any meaning. That isn't MSM [mainstream media] propaganda. That's fact. Every element of it."
This could be yet another one of Musk's almost daily run-ins with figures from politics and Silicon Valley. But the Tesla CEO's criticisms of the encyclopedia, one of the world's most popular sites (20 million monthly visits in France), are not entirely new.
At the end of December 2024, on X, he was already calling on his followers not to donate money to the encyclopedia, then in the middle of its year-end fundraising campaign, to protest against a supposed leftward drift of the site, described as "Wokepedia." The source of this witticism was a message from an account on the American hard right claiming, following a misreading of the Wikimedia Foundation's financial statements, that it devotes $50 million (€48 million) a year to "diversity and inclusion" projects, which Musk and the American Republicans hate. In reality, this sum mainly finances the encyclopedia's development, lawyers' salaries and cybersecurity measures.
Biases that are not necessarily political
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