Elon Musk snubs Paris legal summons over alleged child abuse images on X
Billionaire owner elects not to attend voluntary interview as part of investigation by French cybercrime unit
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 presence or absence [of the people summoned] is not an obstacle to continuing the investigation,” the prosecutors added. They had issued the summons in February as part of an investigation, launched in January 2025, into allegations that X’s algorithm was used to interfere in French politics. The scope was later expanded to include dissemination of Holocaust denial material and sexual deepfakes by X’s AI chatbot Grok.
French prosecutors in February also searched the Paris offices of X, in what the social media company – which has denied any wrongdoing – criticised as “politicised” and an “abusive judicial act”.
At the time, Paris prosecutors also summoned Musk and the company’s then-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”, a move that Musk called a “political attack”. Yaccarino resigned as the chief executive of X in July last year after two years at the helm of the company.
In February, the Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said employees of the company had also been summoned to appear between 20 April and 24 April “to be heard as witnesses”. But whether they turn up for voluntary questioning would not be “an obstacle to the continuation of the investigation”, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Saturday. Officials have not offered any 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. The social media company in July called the investigation “politically motivated”.
Its complaints were echoed on Monday by the Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov, himself the subject of a French investigation into illegal activity on his platform.
“[Emmanuel] Macron’s France is losing legitimacy as it weaponises criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy”, read a post on X by the Russian-born Durov, who also holds French nationality.
The French investigation is taking place amid a broader international backlash against Grok after it emerged that users could sexualise images of women and children using simple text prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”.
It generated an estimated 3m sexualised images – mostly of women, though also 23,000 that appeared to depict children – in 11 days, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit watchdog, said in late January.
In a separate investigation, Britain’s data regulator in February launched investigations into Musk’s X and xAI owing to “serious concerns” as to whether the companies complied with personal data laws when it came to Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfakes.
In January, the EU also hit X with an investigation over Grok’s generation of sexualised deepfake images of women and minors.
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