Billionaire Elon Musk has offered Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, $1 billion on the condition that it change its name to Dickipedia, The Hill reports.

Owner X made the offer in a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The row with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales appears to have started a week ago, when the British-American entrepreneur expressed difficulty in vetting “real journalists” from “fakes” in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After taking over Twitter, Elon Musk removed the blue checkmark assigned to the verified account, and users had to pay for this service. And changing the policy of a social media platform is regularly used to spread false information.

“Claims and counter-claims are spreading fast and @elonmusk has removed all the basic features to even distinguish real journalists from fake,” Wales wrote, according to NME.

In response, Musk wrote: “Please fix Wikipedia,” and criticized the online encyclopedia in a series of tweets in the following days.

The world’s richest man also posted a screenshot of a message from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales that the site was “not for sale.”

“I’ll give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” CEO Musk tweeted.

“Please add this to the (cow and shit emoticon) on my wiki page,” he continued in another post. “For accuracy.”

When journalist Ed Krassenstein suggested the online encyclopedia accept the offer, saying he “can always change it back after he gets the money,” Musk added a condition to his offer.

“At least a year. I mean I’m not stupid lol,” he wrote.

The Wikimedia Foundation criticized Musk

On Sunday, Musk repeatedly criticized the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports and manages Wikipedia, for asking for money.

“Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? They definitely don’t need them to run Wikipedia,” Musk wrote on X.

“You can literally put a copy of the entire text on your phone! So what is the money for? Inquisitive minds want to know…,” continued the former Twitter owner.

The Community Notes app, which allows users to sign up to contribute and create notes on posts for context, left an explanation under its post, initially stating that Wikipedia handles “more than 25 billion page views per month and has more than 44 million edit pages per month, which requires significant operating costs.”

It also states that the organization hires third-party financial auditors whose reports are available to the public.

The foundation has since released $146 million in spending and listed where the money is going.

On Monday, Wikipedia responded by publishing a statement on Musk’s X platform.

“Wikipedia is the only site in the top ten most visited global sites that is managed by a non-profit organization – and with a small share of the budget and staff,” Wikipedia representatives write.

“We’re not ad-supported, we don’t charge subscription fees, and we don’t sell your data.”

Disputes between Musk and Wikipedia

This is not the first time that arrows have been fired at Tesla’s CEO. Wales has been an outspoken critic of Musk. In May, the Wikipedia founder condemned Musk’s decision to censor critics ahead of Turkey’s presidential election.

“What Wikipedia did: We stood up for our principles, fought all the way to the Turkish Supreme Court and won,” Vales wrote in response to Musk’s post, defending his decision. “That’s why we consider freedom of speech as a principle and not as a slogan.”

Musk has come under fire in some quarters for misinformation about X as he bought the platform and introduced a number of changes.

Jimmy Wales founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in 2001 with Larry Sanger.