Just when you thought he must have run out of fingers to stick into pies, the world’s richest man goes and sprouts another one. This week Elon Musk proudly launched his latest venture — not electric cars, not space exploration, not satellites, not tunnels, not social media, not brain implants, not the rolling back of the administrative state, not a new political party, but something altogether more fundamental: a new version of the truth. 

“The goal here is to create an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” Musk posted on X on Tuesday, a day after his xAI company rolled out its first 0.1 version of Grokipedia, an AI-powered online encyclopedia. “Then place copies of that etched in a stable oxide in orbit, the Moon and Mars to preserve it for the future. Foundation.” 

You know, because understandings of what is and isn’t true — and about how to capture the whole truth of a given subject — have famously always just been the kind of straightforward, uncomplicated and static thing that’s really well-suited to being etched on to something that cannot be changed and launched into space. Er, foundation.