A recent target in Elon Musk’s long and eminently tweetable list of grievances: the existence of the world’s most famous encyclopedia. Musk’s latest attack—“Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!” he posted on X last month—coincided with an update to his own Wikipedia page, one that described the Sieg heil–ish arm movement he’d made during an Inauguration Day speech. “Musk twice extended his right arm towards the crowd in an upward angle,” the entry read at one point. “The gesture was compared to a Nazi salute or fascist salute. Musk denied any meaning behind the gesture.” There was little to be upset about; the Wikipedia page didn’t accuse Musk of making a Sieg heil salute. But that didn’t seem to matter to Musk. Wikipedia is “an extension of legacy media propaganda!” he posted.

Musk’s outburst was part of an ongoing crusade against the digital encyclopedia. In recent months, he has repeatedly attempted to delegitimize Wikipedia, suggesting on X that it is “controlled by far-left activists” and calling for his followers to “stop donating to Wokepedia.” Other prominent figures who share his politics have also set their sights on the platform. “Wikipedia has been ideologically captured for years,” Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, posted after Musk’s gesture last month. “Wikipedia lies,” Chamath Palihapitiya, another tech investor, wrote. Pirate Wires, a publication popular among the tech right, has published at least eight stories blasting Wikipedia since August.

Wikipedia is certainly not immune to bad information, disagreement, or political warfare, but its openness and transparency rules have made it a remarkably reliable platform in a decidedly unreliable age. Evidence that it’s an outright propaganda arm of the left, or of any political party, is thin. In fact, one of the most notable things about the site is how it has steered relatively clear of the profit-driven algorithmic mayhem that has flooded search engines and social-media platforms with bad or politically fraught information. If anything, the site, which is operated by a nonprofit and maintained by volunteers, has become more of a refuge in a fractured online landscape than an ideological prison—a “last bastion of shared reality,” as the writer Alexis Madrigal once called it. And that seems to be precisely why it’s under attack.

The extent to which Wikipedia’s entries could be politically slanted has been a subject of inquiry for a long time. (Accusations of liberal bias have persisted just as long: In 2006, the son of the famed conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly launched “Conservapedia” to combat it.) Sock puppets and deceptive editing practices have been problems on the site, as with the rest of the internet. And demographically speaking, it’s true that Wikipedia entries are written and edited by a skewed sliver of humanity: A 2020 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, found that roughly 87 percent of the site’s contributors were male; more than half lived in Europe. In recent years, the foundation has put an increased emphasis on identifying and filling in these so-called knowledge gaps. Research has shown that diversity among Wikipedia’s editors makes information on the site less biased, a spokesperson pointed out to me. For the anti-Wikipedia contingent, however, such efforts are evidence that the site has been taken over by the left. As Pirate Wires has put it, Wikipedia has become a “top-down social activism and advocacy machine.”   

In 2016, two researchers at Harvard Business School examined more than 70,000 Wikipedia articles related to U.S. politics and found that overall they were “mildly more slanted towards the Democratic ‘view’” than analogous Encyclopedia Britannica articles. Still, the finding was nuanced. Entries on civil rights had more of a Democratic slant; articles on immigration had more of a Republican slant. Any charge of “extreme left-leaning bias,” Shane Greenstein, an economist who co-authored the study, told me, “could not be supported by the data.” Things could have changed since then, Greenstein said, but he’s “very skeptical” that they have.

Attacks will continue regardless. In June, the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, published a report suggesting that Wikipedia articles about certain organizations and public figures aligned with the right tend to be associated with greater amounts of negative sentiment than similar groups and figures on the left. When asked about bias on the site, the Wikimedia spokesperson told me that “Wikipedia is not influenced by any one person or group” and that the site’s editors “don’t write to convince but to explain and inform.” (They certainly like to write: A debate over the spelling yogurt versus yoghurt was similar in length to The Odyssey. In the end, yogurt won, but three other spellings are listed in the article’s first sentence.)

The fact that Musk, in his most recent tirade against Wikipedia, didn’t point to any specific errors in the entry about his inauguration gesture is telling. As he gripes about injustice, the fundamental issue he and others in his circle have with Wikipedia seems to be more about control. With his acquisitional approach to global technology and platforms, Musk has gained influence over an astonishing portion of online life. He has turned X into his own personal megaphone, which he uses to spout his far-right political views. Through Starlink, his satellite-internet company, Musk quite literally governs some people’s access to the web. Even other tech platforms that Musk doesn’t own have aligned themselves with him. In early January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would back away from third-party fact-checking on its platforms, explicitly citing X as an inspiration. (Zuckerberg also announced that the company’s trust and safety teams would move from California to Texas, again borrowing from Musk.)

One thing Musk does not control is Wikipedia. Although the site is far from perfect, it remains a place where, unlike much of the internet, facts still matter. That the people who are constantly writing and rewriting Wikipedia entries are disaggregated volunteers—rather than bendable to one man’s ideological views—seems to be in the public interest. The site’s structure is a nuisance for anyone invested in controlling how information is disseminated. With that in mind, the campaign against Wikipedia may best be understood as the apotheosis of a view fashionable among the anti-“woke” tech milieu: Free speech, which the group claims to passionately defend, counts only so long as they like what you have to say. Attempts to increase the diversity of perspectives represented on the site—that is, attempts to bring about more speech—have been construed as “censorship.” This group is less interested in representing multiple truths, as Wikipedia attempts to do, than it is in a singular truth: its own. (Musk, Maguire, and Palihapitiya did not respond to requests for comment.)

Ironically, Wikipedia resembles the version of the internet that Musk and his peers speak most reverently of. Musk often touts X’s Community Notes feature, which encourages users to correct and contextualize misleading posts. That sounds a lot like the philosophy behind … Wikipedia. Indeed, in a recent interview, X’s vice president of product explained that Community Notes took direct inspiration from Wikipedia.

Strike hard enough and often enough, the Wikipedia-haters seem to believe, and the website might just fracture into digital smithereens. Just as Twitter’s user base splintered into X and Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads, one can imagine a sad swarm of rival Wikipedias, each proclaiming its own ideological supremacy. (Musk and others in his orbit have similarly accused Reddit of being “hard-captured by the far left.”) Musk can’t just buy Wikipedia like he did Twitter. In December 2022, months after he purchased the social platform, a New York Post reporter suggested that he do just that. “Not for sale,” Jimmy Wales, one of the site’s co-founders, responded. The following year, Musk mockingly offered to give the site $1 billion to change its name to “Dickipedia.”

Even if he can’t buy Wikipedia, by blasting his more than 215 million followers with screeds against the site and calls for its defunding, Musk may be able to slowly undermine its credibility. (The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual budget of $189 million. Meanwhile, Musk spent some $288 million backing Trump and other Republican candidates this election cycle.) Anyone who defends free speech and democracy should wish for Wikipedia to survive and remain independent. Against the backdrop of a degraded web, the improbable success of a volunteer-run website attempting to gather all the world’s knowledge is something to celebrate, not destroy. And it’s especially valuable when so many prominent tech figures are joining Musk in using their deep pockets to make their own political agendas clear. At Donald Trump’s inauguration, the CEOs of the companies who run the world’s six most popular websites sat alongside Trump’s family on the dais. There was no such representative for the next-most-popular site: Wikipedia.

As Elon Musk set out to upend the federal bureaucracy on behalf of Donald Trump, he reached out to Trump’s team with an unusual request: U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government, but Musk was hoping to make an exception for Baris Akis, a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card who had become a close ally.

The answer, delivered privately by Trump’s advisers, was an unequivocal no, two people familiar with the decision told us.

Trump’s White House is in the business of deporting people, and bringing in a foreign national to help shrink the government’s American workforce would send a confusing message, one of these people said. (Neither Akis nor the White House responded to a request for comment.)

Musk and his team accepted the rejection and moved on, but the previously unreported exchange offers a glimpse into the complex dynamics of the Musk-Trump relationship, arguably the most consequential partnership in Washington. This story is based on interviews with six people who have worked closely with Trump or Musk or are directly familiar with their relationship, all of whom requested anonymity to describe private interactions.

The world’s richest man has established himself as a singular force in the administration’s effort to slash government programs, agencies, and federal employees. Yet as an unelected “special government employee,” Musk still relies on the president for his authority. Since sweeping into Washington alongside Trump, Musk has wielded enormous power. He has pressured federal employees into deferred resignations; dug into government data and financial systems; used his massive social-media platform, X, to pick fights and bully opponents; and fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the woodchipper,” as he boasted yesterday on X, or at least helped get the agency folded into the State Department. He believes that understanding and mastering the government’s computer systems is the key to overhauling and fixing the government. But he does so at Trump’s behest, at least for as long as he has the president’s blessing.

Trump has made a point in recent days of making clear his supremacy over Musk, and Musk, for all his influence, has found himself bending to the strictures of the White House. Musk’s private security team, for instance, must wait in the parking lot at the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue campus when he goes to work in a conference room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building because of the building’s own security protocols, one of the people familiar with the arrangement told us.  

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we will give him the approval where appropriate, and where not appropriate we won’t,” Trump said yesterday during a signing event in the Oval Office. “Where we think there is a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.”

On Sunday, Trump exited Air Force One after arriving in Washington from Palm Beach, and praised Musk as a “cost-cutter” who was “doing a good job,” before establishing the hierarchy: “Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go.”

Trump’s somewhat pointed comments on Musk “are important,” a longtime Trump confidant told us, explaining that “there’s one president.” This person said that Trump had learned about how to work within the government during his first term, but “that’s not true of Elon.”

But Musk nonetheless has threatened to steal the spotlight from Trump in recent days, becoming the public face of the administration’s most disruptive moves, including an effort to force thousands of voluntary resignations from the federal workforce. Inside the West Wing, he has found many allies, having ingratiated himself with mid-tier Trump aides early in the transition, when he moved down to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club and established himself as an accessible, if quirky, presence. He regularly shared his cellphone number, including with younger staff, and spent his days sending around memes and ideas about overhauling the government, according to a person who saw the texts but who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Musk has a group of loyalists he often brings with him to each of his various government projects—a cadre Trump today praised as “smart people.” But, unlike many people with his net worth and renown, Musk “travels pretty light,” one person told us. Two people told us that, during the time he spent at Mar-a-Lago, they most regularly saw him with his young son X—“just that kid on his shoulders,” one of the people said—and sometimes X’s nanny.

Musk preempted Trump shortly after midnight Monday in a live broadcast on X with the announcement that the Trump administration would seek to shutter USAID based on his own team’s investigation of the agency. “As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it,” Musk said. “What we have here is just a ball of worms.”

And he has continued to pick public fights with Democratic leaders despite his new day job as a government employee. He accused House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of wanting to continue “waste fraud and abuse” after Jeffries attacked Musk’s leadership of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which operates as a part of the Executive Office of the President. Musk also wrote on X that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer was mad about his work “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.”

Musk’s decision to seek a special dispensation for a noncitizen adviser came after the Tesla CEO’s views on immigration policy became a flash point inside the president’s circle late last year. When Musk defended the practice of giving H-1B visas to highly skilled foreign workers, Trump allies including Steve Bannon attacked Musk as part of a group of “techno-feudalists” undermining American workers. Trump had previously been critical of the H-1B visa system, but eventually sided with Musk in the dispute. Musk also moderated his stance, calling for “major reform” to how the visas are granted.

Democrats, who have struggled to respond effectively to Trump in the first weeks of his second term, have become more focused on Musk as a potential weak point for the president, as polling has shown significant public concern about Musk. A late-January poll by Quinnipiac University found that 53 percent of voters disapproved of him playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, compared with 39 percent who approved. About one in five Republican voters disapproved of Musk’s role.

Because of his special-government-employee status, Musk’s time in government is expected to be limited. Employees under this status, who do not have to divest from outside conflicts of interest, are permitted to work no more than 130 days in a single year. Other members of Musk’s team, including Katie Miller, a Department of Government Efficiency adviser, are also working for the government under the temporary designation. (Musk is also close to Miller’s husband, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.)

Musk’s preferred work habits before entering the federal bureaucracy could provide a window into how he might continue to feed “into the woodchipper” programs and spending that he views as Washington bloat. During his time in the private sector, Musk tended to burrow into each of his companies on different days, a person familiar with his routine told us. Monday was for SpaceX, Tuesday was for Tesla, and Wednesday was for X.

This week, Sunday and Monday were clearly for USAID. By tomorrow and Thursday, however, he might be ready to turn his buzz saw elsewhere.