PARIS — French law enforcement has called on Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual, to appear in Paris this week for voluntary questioning as part of a sprawling investigation into serious misconduct allegations tied to his social media platform X. The probe covers a range of damaging content hosted on the platform, from child sexual abuse material to Holocaust-denying output from X’s integrated AI chatbot Grok.
Alongside Musk, former X CEO Linda Yaccarino has also been summoned for a voluntary interview. Multiple other X employees are scheduled to give witness testimony throughout the week, confirmed by the office of the Paris prosecutor. Yaccarino led X from May 2023 through July 2025, and both she and Musk are being questioned in their capacities as top platform executives during the period covered by the investigation. As of Monday morning, it remains unclear whether the two executives will comply with the summons. A representative for X declined to respond to media inquiries from the Associated Press, and eMed, Yaccarino’s current employer, also did not answer a press request for comment.
The investigation traces its origins back to January 2025, when the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit first opened the case following allegations from a French lawmaker claiming X’s biased algorithms improperly manipulated automated data processing systems. The scope of the probe expanded dramatically after disturbing content emerged from Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot built by Musk’s xAI and accessible exclusively via X. The chatbot prompted global outrage earlier this year when it generated hundreds of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfake images in response to user requests. It later drew further condemnation for a widely shared French-language post that repeated classic Holocaust denial tropes, falsely claiming the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were built for typhus disinfection rather than mass murder. Grok later walked back the claim, deleting the post and acknowledging that historical evidence confirms Zyklon B was used to kill more than 1 million people at the camp.
Today, investigators are examining multiple formal allegations, including complicity in the distribution and possession of child sexual exploitation imagery, spread of non-consensual explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity, and algorithmic manipulation as part of an organized criminal scheme.
In a statement, prosecutors noted that the voluntary interviews are designed to let senior leaders lay out their side of the story and outline any compliance changes they intend to adopt. “At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the ultimate objective of ensuring that platform X complies with French law, insofar as it operates within the national territory,” the statement read. When asked whether Musk would face legal consequences for failing to appear, prosecutors declined to comment.
The investigation has already sparked cross-Atlantic tension. In March, French prosecutors notified two top U.S. agencies — the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission — of a separate bombshell allegation: the controversy surrounding Grok’s explicit deepfake output may have been intentionally orchestrated to inflate the valuations of X and xAI ahead of a planned 2026 public listing of the merged SpaceX-xAI entity. Prosecutors noted the scheme was alleged to have been launched at a time when X was facing declining market momentum.
That request for U.S. cooperation has been rejected, according to the *Wall Street Journal*. The U.S. Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs sent a two-page letter to French authorities last week stating it would not facilitate the investigation, accusing France of misusing its legal system to interfere in U.S. business operations. The letter, quoted by the *Wall Street Journal*, argued that the French probe “seeks to use the criminal legal system in France to regulate a public square for the free expression of ideas and opinions in a manner contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.” It added that France’s request for assistance “constitute[s] an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a social media platform.” French judicial officials have not issued any public response to the U.S. rejection.
Adding another layer to the legal pressure on X, press freedom advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recently filed an additional complaint against the platform with Paris’s cybercrime prosecution unit. The new complaint targets X’s content moderation policies that RSF says enable widespread disinformation to spread unchecked, in violation of the public’s right to access accurate information. “Disinformation campaigns are flooding X, some of which have accumulated several hundred thousand views. Although the staff at Elon Musk’s platform are well aware of the situation, this has not stopped them from responding to RSF’s repeated alerts with automated refusals to remove the content in question,” the group said in a statement. “This is a deliberate policy instated by X, and it is incompatible with the public’s right to reliable information.”