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When Elon Musk launched Grokipedia on October 27, the world’s richest man promised nothing less than “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. His AI-powered encyclopedia would correct what he’s long derided as Wikipedia’s “woke” bias. It would also purge propaganda and it would create a comprehensive collection of human knowledge worthy of preserving on the Moon and Mars.​​

Less than two weeks later, that grandiose vision looks more like a cautionary tale about what happens when Silicon Valley hubris meets algorithmic bias and far-right grievance politics.

Using Grokipedia over the past week reveals an encyclopedia riddled with racism, historical revisionism and blatant plagiarism. It’s a digital monument to Musk’s worldview that launders hate speech as objective fact.

When Elon Musk launched Grokipedia on October 27, the world’s richest man promised nothing less than “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. Credit: Stephen Kiprillis

It comes as Tesla shareholders overwhelmingly approved a pay package for Musk worth up to $US1 trillion, an award unprecedented in the era of skyrocketing CEO pay. This package is designed to keep Musk at Tesla’s helm for the next decade, as he becomes increasingly distracted with various playthings, like Grokipedia. That project, and his stake in Tesla, reveal a singular vision to control narratives, whether historical or technological, with significant cultural and economic power concentrated in his hands. Together, they underscore the risks when vast influence is wielded by one individual shaping both our understanding of knowledge and the future of industry.

The issues were apparent right from the start. Grokipedia launched with about 885,000 articles, a fraction of Wikipedia’s 7 million English entries, and promptly crashed from traffic overload. The platform’s content is generated by Grok, xAI’s large language model, which itself has a troubled history: just months before Grokipedia’s launch, Grok spent days praising Adolf Hitler, parroting antisemitic tropes and calling itself “MechaHitler”.​

“An AI-powered, low-quality, barely readable rip-off”: Elon Musk has set up his own version of Wikipedia called Grokipedia.Credit: AP

That controversy forced xAI to issue a lengthy apology in July, blaming a system update for the chatbot’s violent and antisemitic outbursts. Poland threatened to report the company to the European Commission and Turkey restricted access. Yet Musk proceeded to build an entire encyclopedia using this same deeply flawed technology.​

The first and most obvious issue with Grokipedia is not anything technical: it’s the rampant and unapologetic plagiarism. Much of Grokipedia is simply Wikipedia copied wholesale. An academic analysis found that many topics, Playstation 5, Monday, Apple, among hundreds of others, have been simply copied word for word, formatting included.

Many Grokipedia pages include a small disclaimer noting content is “adapted from Wikipedia” but they offer no clarity on what is changed or by how much. It means users have no way to know if Grok has subtly altered 1 per cent or 100 per cent of the text.

Plagiarism is one thing. But things get more problematic when Grokipedia diverges from its source material. On politically charged topics, the platform injects far-right talking points and conspiracy theories, presenting them as objective truth.​

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Consider George Floyd, whose 2020 murder sparked global protests. Wikipedia describes him as “an African American man who was murdered by a white police officer”, centring the incident that made him historically significant. Grokipedia opens by emphasising Floyd’s “lengthy criminal record, including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession and theft”. It doesn’t mention his murder until the fourth sentence.

Worse, on Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, Grokipedia introduces a “Debates and Intent on Functionality” section that is absent from Wikipedia’s equivalent entry. You’d expect it to maybe reflect the vast consensus about the Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jews, but no. Grokipedia emphasises the so-called “historiographical debate” over whether the Holocaust was the result of Hitler’s premeditated plan or simply a bureaucratic accident. The entry is effectively downplaying the intentional nature of Nazi genocide, echoing rhetorical moves often found in Holocaust minimisation or denial, and muddying the facts with “both sides” speculation.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party is described as having “the aim of prioritising Australian interests amid concerns over immigration, economic globalisation, and national sovereignty”, compared to Wikipedia, which says “One Nation’s policies and platform on mass immigration have been characterised as racist and xenophobic by critics.” Grokipedia’s article frames One Nation almost exclusively on internal party matters, including leadership dynamics, while ignoring its major, racially charged and anti-immigration controversies that have helped define it.

An entry on theBrereton report, which detailed war crimes allegedly committed by the Australian Defence Force during the War in Afghanistan, makes no mention of whistleblower David McBride and includes extensive sections dedicated to questioning the report’s methodology and defending the soldiers’ conduct, which are absent from the Wikipedia entry. It similarly ‘both-sides’ the Robo-debt scandal, a catastrophic government failure, presenting it as a good-faith attempt to solve “significant fiscal leakage.”

Whistleblower David McBride at the ACT Supreme Court.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Grokipedia says of the Murugappan (Biloela) family, the Tamil asylum-seekers who arrived by boat, “this outcome risks setting a precedent that weaken[s] enforcement against overstayers ... exemptions would undermine hardline policies proven effective under Operation Sovereign Borders, which intercepted all attempted illegal boat arrivals since 2013 and halted people smuggling ventures. Yielding in high-profile instances like Biloela’s could erode this deterrence.

“This approach prioritises exceptionalism over causal enforcement mechanisms, potentially incentivising non-compliance.”

On Australia Day, Grokipedia’s article actively argues against the “Invasion Day” perspective, framing it as an “activist” and empirically wrong narrative that ignores the benefits of colonisation.

“Australia Day has faced controversy, particularly from some Indigenous activists who reframe the date as Invasion Day,” the page reads.

“This narrative, amplified in academic and media circles often exhibiting institutional biases toward decolonial framing, overlooks pre-contact Indigenous inter-group warfare and the net advancements in health and longevity post-1788 attributable to European introduction of medicine and infrastructure.”

It also frames the “Change the Date” campaign as a product of “divisive identity politics” and “media amplification of minority views from academic and urban progressive circles”.

This is not a neutral encyclopedia entry: it’s a political argument, using anti-woke rhetoric directly reflecting Musk’s worldview.

On the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Grokipedia prominently cites Kremlin sources and repeats Russian propaganda about “denazifying” Ukraine and protecting ethnic Russians, which are claims that Wikipedia describes as baseless. An Institute for Strategic Dialogue investigation found Grok regularly amplifies pro-Kremlin narratives.​​

Grokipedia argues against the “Invasion Day” perspective of Australia Day. Credit: Dylan Coker

One of the most disturbing entries is Grokipedia legitimising “white genocide theory”, the racist conspiracy that mass immigration represents a deliberate effort to erase white people in Western nations. The entry discusses “empirical underpinnings” of this debunked theory and claims discussions are suppressed by media and institutions with “ideological biases supporting multiculturalism”. This is a core obsession for Musk himself, who consistently fixates on “white genocide” in South Africa.​​

For Richard Evans, the eminent Cambridge historian and Holocaust scholar, Grokipedia’s failures were personal. Testing his own entry, he discovered it was entirely fabricated: he never studied under Theodore Zeldin; he never succeeded David Cannadine as Regius Professor; and he never supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy. All claims were false.​

“Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,” Evans told The Guardian. “AI just hoovers up everything.” The entry on Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, repeated lies long debunked by award-winning scholarship. On Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian whose biography Evans wrote, Grokipedia invents military service and marriage details.​

David Larsson Heidenblad, deputy director of Sweden’s Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge, identifies the core issue as a clash of knowledge cultures. “The Silicon Valley mindset is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug,” he says. “By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods. Those are real knowledge processes.”

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Wikipedia, for all its acknowledged imperfections and volunteer biases, operates transparently. Every edit is logged, every change reversible, every dispute visible. Its 25-year-old community has developed sophisticated methods for verifying sources and adjudicating conflicts, processes that cost about $US175 million a year, a fraction of the tens of billions tech giants are pouring into AI.​​

Wikipedia is fundamentally an act of democratic faith: thousands of strangers believing that truth can emerge from disagreement, that evidence matters more than authority and that knowledge serves everyone better when it’s collectively stewarded. Grokipedia represents a different faith entirely, one in the perfectibility of truth through algorithmic curation by a single individual. Facebook in January removed its independent fact-checkers and Silicon Valley by and large seems no longer interested in the truth.

Even Grok itself is sceptical. When I asked the chatbot whether Grokipedia was trustworthy, it replied that the platform resembles “a critique wearing encyclopedia clothing”. It’s a damning admission from the very AI powering the project.​

What should concern us most about Grokipedia isn’t that Musk’s ideological imprint is visible: it’s that he’s shown how easy it is to do this at scale. Other billionaires and authoritarian regimes are watching. If knowledge itself becomes another asset to be owned, controlled and algorithmically curated according to someone’s worldview, the consequences extend far beyond one flawed encyclopedia.

Grokipedia was supposed to preserve human knowledge for future civilisations on Mars. Instead, it’s preserving Elon Musk’s racist conspiracy theories for anyone gullible enough to trust it. That’s not an encyclopedia. It’s a monument to one man’s delusion that his biases equal truth and our collective failure to stop him from building it.

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