‘Damn, They Suck’: Elon Musk Slams Wikipedia Over How Much It Spent On Woke DEI Programs

While some major corporations are responding to public pressure by canceling so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs that many critics feel are inherently discriminatory.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes Wikipedia, however, is still spending big bucks on such programs. Of the money donated by users to fund the site’s 2023-2024 budget, nearly 30% of it (or $51.7 million) went to further the DEI agenda.

As TheBlaze reported:

This included programs to strengthen efforts related to ensuring “equity in decision-making” surrounding the themes of education, culture and heritage, and gender.

Specifically for gender, the organization described prioritizing “more inclusive, gender-equitable and safe spaces” in order to contribute to “intersectional content on women’s biographies and material.”

The confusing descriptions for the programs included a need for “facilitated processes” for contributors and editors so they can have “extended rights to onboard gender equitable norms and practices into the volunteer experience.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk was among the many social media users who denounced these expenditures:

They spent $50M on DEI!? Damn, they suck.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2024

Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority https://t.co/sHjnFTtN5y

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2024

Plenty of others shared his sentiment:

Wikipedia is woke propaganda, full of hypocrisy. pic.twitter.com/J6qnmvjhmU

— Marc 🇺🇸 (@gopher_marc) December 26, 2024

I would never trust Wikipedia 🤦👇 pic.twitter.com/ZqCmkHMBq7

— Anti Left Memes (@AntiLeftMemes) December 26, 2024

The New York Post provided additional coverage of the backlash against Wikipedia:

Walmart, Ford Motor Company, Molson Coors, Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Forman, Boeing and Harley Davidson were among some of the major brands that have cut back on DEI initiatives in recent months.

Wikipedia, the free, online collaborative encyclopedia that boasts a whopping 4 billion visits to its website per month, has long maintained that it is politically neutral. But studies have found that it is plagued by a left-leaning bias.

Earlier this year, Wikipedia removed reference to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “border czar” in one of its entries after President Joe Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed her to run against Trump.

Harris and her supporters denied that she was a “border czar” despite the fact that Biden assigned her the task of overseeing the administration’s migrant policies during his presidency.

In June, a report by the libertarian Manhattan Institute found that Wikipedia has a “mild to moderate tendency…to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center.”

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Here’s some commentary from John Stossel regarding Wikipedia’s bias: