Summons: Elon Musk snubs Paris prosecutors

Elon Musk did not appear Monday for a voluntary interview with Paris prosecutors, who had summoned the American tech billionaire over a probe into his social media platform X and AI chatbot Grok.

Prosecutors told AFP they had “taken note of the absence of the first people summoned,” without mentioning Musk’s name.

The billionaire had dubbed the French authorities “retards” weeks earlier in a French-language X post. “The presence or absence (of the people summoned) is not an obstacle to continuing the investigation,” 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 probe was later expanded to include dissemination of Holocaust denial 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 giant — which has denied any wrongdoing — slammed as “politicized” raids and an “abusive judicial act”.

At the time, Paris prosecutors also summoned Musk and then-CEO 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 Musk called a “political attack”.

Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X in July last year after two years at the helm of the company.

– ‘Politically motivated’ –

In February, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said employees of the company had also been summoned to appear between April 20 and 24 “to be heard as witnesses”. Vanguard