Elon Musk did not appear on Monday for a voluntary interview with lawyers in Paris, who had summoned the American tech billionaire over an investigation into his social media platform X and AI chatbot Grok. The prosecutors told AFP that they had “taken note of the absence of the first people summoned”, without mentioning Musk’s name. The billionaire called the French authorities involved “retards” weeks earlier in a French-language post on X.
The investigation, launched in January 2025, initially focused on allegations that X’s algorithm was used to interfere in French politics. Its scope was later expanded to include dissemination of Holocaust denial material and sexual deepfakes by Grok. In February, French prosecutors searched X’s Paris offices, which the company criticised as “politicised” and an “abusive judicial act”.
French prosecutors also summoned Musk and the former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino for voluntary interviews as the “de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events”. Musk called the move a “political attack”. Yaccarino resigned in July last year after two years as CEO. Officials have not offered details on the location or time of Musk’s scheduled interview.
The French investigation focuses on several suspected criminal offences, including complicity in possessing child sexual abuse material and denial of crimes against humanity. A separate investigation by Britain’s data regulator into X and xAI was launched in February over “serious concerns” about Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfakes. The EU also opened an investigation in January over similar issues.
Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov, himself under French investigation over illegal activity on his platform, echoed X’s complaints, posting that “Macron’s France is losing legitimacy as it weaponises criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy”. The backlash against Grok intensified after reports that users could generate sexualised images of women and children with simple prompts, producing an estimated three million such images in 11 days, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
