Elon Musk arrives at the federal courthouse in San Francisco, United States, on March 4, 2026. He is facing a civil trial for allegedly manipulating Twitter's stock price ahead of his acquisition of the company in 2022. JOSH EDELSON / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
Did Elon Musk attempt to artificially inflate the user numbers of his social network X in anticipation of a possible listing? That is what prosecutors at the cyber section of the Paris prosecutor's office believe, Le Monde learned on Friday, March 20. Their chief, Johanna Brousse, sent two reports on Tuesday: the first to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the second to the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
This act of judicial cooperation with the DOJ, known as a "spontaneous exchange of information," was prompted by facts uncovered by French prosecutors while investigating a case opened in France against the social network in early 2025. That ongoing investigation is focused in particular on the app's allegedly biased content recommendation algorithm and the creation of "deepfakes" – AI-generated images by X's chatbot, Grok – including, in some cases, non-consensual sexually explicit images of minors.
The information found by the French prosecutors and sent across the Atlantic, "available in open source, [suggests] that the controversy sparked by [these] deepfakes (...) may have been deliberately generated to artificially boost the valuation of X and X AI," the parent company of Grok, the Paris prosecutor's office said, corroborating information obtained by Le Monde. This happened at a crucial time for the company, ahead of "the planned June 2026 IPO of the new entity formed from the merger of SpaceX and X AI, while X was clearly losing momentum," the prosecutor's office added. Contacted directly and through its lawyer in France, Twitter has not yet responded. An SEC spokesperson declined to comment, and the US Department of Justice has not answered our requests.
