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Spending Some of the ostensible concern about Wikipedia revolves around its spending, though not about the most recent boneheaded claims that Wikipedia is “wasting $50 million” on “DEI” that I’ve already addressed. Amusingly, the question of whether the Wikimedia Foundation’s actual spending is justifiable is arguably Musk’s most reasonable argument, but it’s also one he hasn’t brought up in a long time. “Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone!j So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know …”, wrote Musk in October 2023.45 Setting aside why Elon Musk is the one asking this question — the man who says he personally needs a pay package46 of 300-500× the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual budget for the upcoming year47 — Musk betrays the same complete lack of understanding for how software companies work as when he acquired Twitter and claimed it would work just fine if he fired nearly everyone based on absurd evaluations of their productivity (it hasn’t).48 While the cost to simply host a 50-gigabyte stripped-down copy of Wikipedia, or even the hundreds of terabytes of all content across all projects, might be comparatively low, Musk is apparently ignorant to the massive infrastructure costs for running a project like Wikipedia: maintaining and developing MediaWiki (the software that doesn’t just display Wikipedia articles