Elon Musk looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, November 19, 2025. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP
French prosecutors said on Saturday, March 21, that they had alerted US authorities to a suspicion that tech tycoon Elon Musk had encouraged controversy over sexualized deepfakes on X to "artificially" increase the value of his company.
The social media network's Grok AI chatbot stirred outrage earlier this year over it generating images of naked women and girls without their consent.
"The controversy sparked by sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok [X's A] may have been deliberately generated in order to artificially boost the value of companies X and xAI," the Paris prosecutor's office said, confirming a report in Le Monde newspaper on Friday. This could have been done towards "the planned June 2026 stock market listing of the new entity created by the merger" between SpaceX and xAI, it added.
The prosecutor's office said it had on Tuesday reached out to the US Department of Justice, as well as the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a financial market regulation body, to share its concerns.
