The gesture was controversial enough, but now come the sub-controversies: Elon Musk is trolling Wikipedia and encouraging its defunding after a description of his recent flourish, seen by some as a Hitler salute, appeared on the encyclopedic website.The fight pits two of the internet’s best-known tech giants against each other — and highlights the starkly different ethos behind Musk’s X social media site and Wikipedia, founded by American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales.Musk, as the majority owner of X, is behind recent easing of content moderation rules, which has allowed for rampant disinformation across his social media platform, while simultaneously positioning himself as President Donald Trump’s right-hand man.While Musk’s animosity towards Wikipedia may focus outwardly on the hand gesture, Wikipedia’s goal of factual neutrality makes it a natural adversary to X, a platform increasingly synonymous with heated culture wars, hate speech and disinformation.Wikipedia and the media at large — which Musk has increasingly criticized — also pose a threat by holding him accountable as he thrusts himself into the center of US politics.In a December interview with New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Wales said the aim at Wikipedia is for editors to create content that is “clear and acknowledges the different viewpoints out there” even amid “the rise in divisive feelings, partisanship, culture wars, all of that.”At present, the site is regarded as generally reliable despite being written by a community of volunteers.The dustup between Musk and Wales began after the billionaire raised eyebrows Monday with his gesticulation at a Trump inauguration event.Thanking a crowd for returning Trump to the White House, Musk tapped the left side of his chest with his right hand and then extended his arm with his palm open. He then turned around to the crowd behind him and did it again.As of Wednesday, both Musk’s biographical Wikipedia page as well as the page on the “Nazi salute” mention the episode.- ‘Defund’ Wikipedia -On Tuesday, Musk reposted what appeared to be part of that Wikipedia entry, although the wording found on Wikipedia as of Wednesday was slightly different.The reposted text read: “In his speech during the second Trump inauguration, Musk twice extended his right arm towards the crowd in an upward angle. The gesture was compared to a Nazi salute or fascist salute. Musk denied any meaning behind the gesture.”Alongside the repost, Musk attacked both Wikipedia and the news media, another favorite target, suggesting that each is a purveyor of disinformation.”Since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” Musk wrote. He additionally called on his supporters to “defund” Wikipedia.Trolling Musk for his 2022 purchase of X for $44 billion, Wales shot back that: “I think Elon is unhappy that Wikipedia is not for sale.”Run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia is an outlier among today’s internet landscape, dominated by the likes of Google and Meta — instead harking back to the web’s early, idealistic days when the open-source movement harnessed the talents of volunteers to offer free access to tools and knowledge.Wales asked Musk whether there was “anything you consider inaccurate in that description?” and added that it wasn’t propaganda but “fact. Every element of it.”- ‘Trying to be clear’ -Founded on January 15, 2001, the Wikipedia website started in English but within two months had already launched in German and Swedish. It is now available in hundreds of languages.”I would say the decline of trust in journalism and politics is quite severe, which then, in some cases, translates into people feeling more angry and lost,” Wales told Intelligencer.But among the Wikipedia community, he said, “we just plug away, trying to be neutral, trying to be clear.”After Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, he gutted trust and safety teams and introduced Community Notes, a crowd-sourced moderation tool that the platform has promoted as the way for users to add context to posts.But researchers say the lowering of the guardrails on X, and the reinstatement of once-banned accounts of known misinformation peddlers, has turned the platform into a haven for misinformation.

US tech titans Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are taking a prominent place in the new Trump era, but another player from another era — Oracle boss Larry Ellison — is making a surprise return.In the first 48 hours of Trump’s second term, the 80-year-old Silicon Valley veteran has become central to two pressing issues: the fate of TikTok and the growing infrastructure demands of artificial intelligence.Though Ellison’s prominence peaked in the 1990s, before the internet age, when he made headlines as a sports-loving maverick with a passion for tennis, sailing, and public spats with Bill Gates, his influence persists.Unlike most tech leaders who distanced themselves from Trump in 2016, Ellison offered his early support. Today, he ranks among the world’s wealthiest individuals, with a fortune of $230 billion, trailing only Musk and Bezos but ahead of Zuckerberg.On Tuesday, Trump’s first full day in office, Ellison made an unexpected White House appearance to unveil an AI infrastructure project alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.”He’s sort of CEO of everything. He’s an amazing man,” Trump enthused while introducing his longtime ally.”The data center we already built, it was the largest computer ever built. The data center we’re building will surpass it,” Ellison said after the meeting.Ellison’s relationship with the Trump administration dates back to the first term, when he played a pivotal role in negotiations over stripping TikTok from its Chinese ownership.In the process, Oracle became a trusted provider of the company’s data storage in the United States.Oracle maintains that role to this day, and is key to keeping TikTok available to US users, at the request of Trump and in a defiance of a US law that could see Ellison’s company fined $5,000 per user.The company is frequently mentioned as a potential buyer of TikTok’s US operations, which were given 75 days on Monday to find non-Chinese ownership or face a permanent ban. Oracle’s share price was up more than seven percent after the AI announcement. – Musk ties -Ellison built his fortune through Oracle, which he founded in 1977 as a data server provider for the CIA among others.Early on, the company competed with Microsoft, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to provide the data infrastructure for the emerging digital economy.Under Ellison’s leadership, Oracle became known for its aggressive corporate culture and ambitious acquisition strategy, spending billions to become the world’s largest database management company.While Oracle’s market value remains smaller than tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, the company has seen renewed growth amid the AI boom and increasing demand for data server capacity.At the height of his career, Ellison was the brash and hard-knuckle counterpoint to Bill Gates.Ellison made headlines picking fights with some of the biggest names in technology – Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt – and became comrades in arms with others, most famously Steve Jobs during the period the Apple founder was still exiled from the company he created.While Gates attended elite private schools and Harvard with family support, Ellison grew up on Chicago’s South Side, raised by his great-aunt and heavy-drinking uncle after his teenage mother gave him up at birth in 1944.Known for his athletic build and perpetual tan, Ellison invested heavily in professional sailing, with his Oracle team winning the America’s Cup in both 2010 and 2013.In recent years, he has formed close ties with Musk, investing $1 billion in Twitter’s acquisition and serving on Tesla’s board as a major shareholder.His extensive real estate portfolio includes a $300 million Hawaiian island, which he envisions as an exclusive eco-resort for the ultra-wealthy and where Musk is a visitor.

President Donald Trump wants to boost US oil production, pledging to bring costs down as he returned to office this week — but analysts warn his efforts could be hampered by the industry itself.Taking aim at an “inflation crisis” which he said was driven by rising energy prices, Trump vowed: “Today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.””We will be a rich nation again. And it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he pledged in his inaugural address on Monday.While the United States is the world’s leading crude oil producer, the US president wants to boost oil and gas production to lower costs, fill strategic reserves and “export American energy all over the world.”In declaring a national energy emergency, Trump reversed some drilling bans, including in a protected area in Alaska.”It’s hard to reconcile the notion that we have an energy emergency, when the US produced 13.2 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2024,” said analyst Stewart Glickman of CFRA.This was “more than any other country.”The US Energy Information Administration also estimates that US production will hit 13.5 million barrels a day this year, “which would imply yet another annual record,” Glickman told AFP.- Economic interest -But analysts say the prospect of oversupply and worries about global demand currently could make US producers reluctant to step on the accelerator — to prevent crude prices from falling too much.US oil companies will likely “act in their own interest” economically, and drill when they expect it to be profitable, said Andrew Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.That will depend on the price of oil, he added, alongside the return on capital.Some oil majors are already cautious about global supply.”We are seeing record levels of demand for oil, record levels for demand for products coming out of our refineries,” said ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods on CNBC in November.”But we also see a lot of supply in the world right now,” he said, adding that much of it comes from the United States.Woods recounted how, after the merger of Exxon and Mobil in 1999, the group owned 45 refineries.But when he took the helm in 2017, it only had 22 refineries, he told CNBC.Trump’s strategy has also puzzled analysts considering the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies (OPEC+) has 5.8 million barrels per day of unused capacity, said Robert Yawger of Mizuho Americas.Eight members of OPEC+, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, have planned to gradually reverse production cuts of 2.2 million barrels per day since last year.- Profitability -The new US administration “has to justify increases in production by the bottom line. It has to be cost-effective,” said Yawger.”They’re not going to repeat the problem that we’ve done in the past, and that’s just oversupply the market and kill the golden goose,” he added.The emergence of shale oil and gas at the turn of the 2010s disrupted the American oil industry.Concerned about the rise of the United States, Saudi Arabia decided to retaliate by flooding the oil market, causing the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the American benchmark, to fall to $26 in 2016.A part of the shale oil industry shuttered, and surviving players vowed to manage their growth and finances more effectively.”Misguided, irrational energy policies are done,” said Jeff Eshelman, president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said in response to Trump’s announcements. “America’s vast resources will be unleashed responsibly,” he added.

Meta-owned Instagram has been wooing creators from TikTok as the China-based video-snippet sharing app’s future remains uncertain in the United States.After officially increasing the allowed length of videos and adding a new editing tool, Meta recently began letting TikTok creators earn as much as $5,000 over the course of three months for posting “Reels” to Facebook and Instagram.The “Breakthrough Bonus” program for eligible TikTok creators is intended to “help jumpstart their growth on our apps,” a Meta spokesperson told AFP.In addition, Meta is quietly offering incentives amounting to tens of thousands of dollars a month to get creators with large TikTok audiences to switch to rival platform Reels at Instagram, according to a report Wednesday in The Information.”Meta has been trying to take advantage of the volatility around TikTok for months, and now its efforts to court TikTok creators have gone from subtle to overt,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg.- Temporary reprieve -The campaign to get TikTok stars to switch allegiance to Reels comes as TikTok’s future in the United States remains unsettled.TikTok is facing down a US law that ordered the company to divest from its Chinese owner ByteDance or be banned in the United States.In one of his first acts in office, President Donald Trump ordered a pause on enforcing the law that should have seen TikTok effectively made illegal in the country on Sunday.The executive order directed his attorney general to delay the implementation of the law for 75 days.The TikTok ban passed due to concerns that the Chinese government could exploit the app to spy on Americans or covertly influence US public opinion through data collection and content manipulation.TikTok briefly shut down in the United States late Saturday as the law’s sale deadline approached, leaving millions of dismayed users barred from the app. That same day, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced that video snippets shared on Reels could now last 3 minutes instead of 90 seconds, a limit set more than two years ago.On Sunday, Mosseri announced a new video editing application will make its debut on iPhones in February.That comes as TikTok’s flagship editing tool, CapCut, has disappeared from mobile app stores in the United States because it’s owned by the same parent company, ByteDance.”There’s a lot going on right now, but no matter what happens, it’s our job to provide the best possible tools for creators,” Mosseri said.- Zuckerberg and Trump -Analyst Enberg believes the new features won’t be enough to win over the TikTok faithful, with some likely to be irked by “blatant copycat behavior” as many are “rattled” by Meta’s moves to align itself with the Trump administration.Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has dined with Trump since his victory, openly praised the president and appointed Trump allies to positions of influence at the tech firm.Meta also recently ended programs to prevent disinformation and vitriol on its platform, efforts long criticized by political conservatives.While Instagram is considered the most likely alternative to TikTok, Chinese application named Xiaohongshu — nicknamed “Red Note” — is a preferred option for many in the United States.Even though the app is in Mandarin, many see it as a way of thumbing their noses at Meta and US politicians.”The potential of a cash bonus is going to be hard for TikTok creators to resist, regardless of how they feel about Meta,” said analyst Enberg.As for users, they will follow where their beloved creators lead, and there is no better way to get them to Instagram than money, Enberg reasoned.