Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has called on his followers to stop donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, citing concerns over the organization’s significant budget allocation to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority,” Musk wrote Tuesday on X, the social media platform where he has nearly 210 million followers.
Musk’s comment came in response to a post by the right-leaning commentator “Libs of TikTok,” who highlighted a pie chart showing that 29% of Wikipedia’s $177 million 2023-24 budget is allocated to “equity” and “safety & inclusion.”
According to Wikimedia Foundation’s publicly available financial documents, $51.7 million has been set aside for these purposes.
Specifically, 17.6% of the budget ($31.2 million) is directed toward equity initiatives, while 11.6% ($20.5 million) is dedicated to safety and inclusion.
The largest share of the budget—48.7% ($86.1 million)—is allocated to infrastructure, followed by 22.2% ($39.2 million) for effectiveness measures.
The foundation stated, “Supporting equity represents the second largest part of our programmatic work, with grants and Movement support representing the majority of the budget within the equity goal.”
DEI initiatives, aimed at fostering diversity and inclusion in workplaces, have faced criticism from conservatives, who argue that such policies can lead to reverse discrimination and a shift away from merit-based systems.
The debate over DEI has intensified since corporate America widely adopted these practices following the 2020 death of George Floyd.
However, recent months have seen a reversal of these policies in some companies under pressure from public campaigns led by right-leaning figures like Robby Starbuck.
Notable corporations such as Walmart, Ford Motor Company, Molson Coors, and Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Forman have scaled back DEI initiatives.
Wikipedia, which receives approximately 4 billion monthly visits, asserts that it operates with political neutrality.
However, studies and reports have repeatedly pointed out the platform’s left-leaning bias.
Earlier this year, the online encyclopedia came under scrutiny when it removed a reference to Kamala Harris as a “border czar” in one of its entries.
This occurred after Joe Biden endorsed Harris to run against Donald Trump, despite Biden’s earlier assignment of border policy oversight to her during his administration.
A June report from the Manhattan Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that Wikipedia articles tend to portray right-leaning public figures with more negative sentiment, such as anger and disgust, compared to the positive emotions like joy more frequently associated with left-leaning figures.
Similarly, a 2012 study published in the American Economic Review analyzed 28,000 Wikipedia articles on U.S. politics and concluded that the entries leaned Democrat on average.
Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001, has also raised concerns about the platform’s political bias.
In a 2021 interview with Unherd.com, Sanger claimed that Democratic-leaning volunteers actively remove content that conflicts with their views, citing the Hunter Biden laptop controversy as an example. “Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” Sanger said.
Sanger and Wales have clashed over the years regarding their respective roles in founding the platform.
Sanger maintains that he co-founded Wikipedia, while Wales describes Sanger as a subordinate employee.
Wales has faced criticism for allegedly editing his own Wikipedia entry to downplay Sanger’s contributions.
As debates over Wikipedia’s neutrality and spending practices continue, Musk’s comments have amplified conservative criticism of the platform’s governance and priorities.
