Elon Musk failed to appear on Monday for a voluntary interview to which he had been summoned by lawyers in Paris as part of an investigation into his X platform and the smart chatbot Grok.
The French prosecutor's office announced that it had "taken note of the absence of the first individuals summoned," without directly naming Musk. The billionaire had described the relevant French authorities as "backward" weeks earlier in a French-language post on the X platform.
The prosecution confirmed that the absence of those summoned does not impede the continuation of the investigation, noting that the summonses were issued last February as part of an investigation that began in January 2025 into allegations that the "X" platform's algorithms were used to influence French politics. The investigation was later expanded to include sexually explicit images produced by the "Groq" robot.
February also saw French prosecutors raid the offices of the "X" platform in Paris, a move the company – which denies any wrongdoing – described as "politically motivated" and an "arbitrary judicial procedure."
In the same context, both Musk and the platform's former CEO, Linda Iaccarino, were summoned for voluntary interviews as the de facto and legal directors of the platform during the period of the events, which Musk considered a "political attack".
It is worth noting that Iaccarino resigned from her position last July after two years of leading the company.
Other company employees were also summoned to give their testimony between April 20 and 24, but the prosecution stressed that their attendance was voluntary and that their absence would not impede the investigation.
The French investigation focuses on several suspected criminal offenses, most notably complicity in the possession of child sexual abuse material and denial of crimes against humanity. The company had described the investigation last July as politically motivated, a complaint echoed by Pavel Durov, the co-founder of Telegram, who is himself under French investigation. Durov wrote on the X platform that "France under Emmanuel Macron is losing its legitimacy when it misuses criminal investigations to suppress freedom of expression and privacy."
This investigation comes at a time when the GROK platform is facing international backlash after it was revealed that users could sexualize images of women and children using simple text commands such as "take off her clothes." The Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed that GROK generated approximately 3 million sexually explicit images in just 11 days, mostly of women, in addition to 23,000 images featuring children.
