Elon Musk Ignores French Prosecutors, Widening Tech Rift With Europe

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Elon Musk Ignores French Prosecutors, Widening Tech Rift With Europe

Prosecutors investigating his social media company, X, had summoned him for a meeting. His no-show reflected a broader dispute over regulation.

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Elon Musk speaking in Switzerland in January. He has previously denounced the French investigation.

Credit...

Denis Balibouse/Reuters

By

Catherine Porter

Reporting from Paris

April 20, 2026

Updated

2:54 p.m. ET

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Elon Musk ignored a summons to meet on Monday morning with Paris prosecutors investigating him and his social media company, X, deepening the standoff between the French judicial system and the American tech giant.

Mr. Musk’s no-show came more than two months after the French police had

raided X’s Paris premises

as part of a long-running investigation by the cybercrime division of the Paris prosecutor’s office.

The prosecutors have been investigating X since January 2025 and they have spoken of looking into seven potential counts under French law, including accusations of complicity in distributing child sexual abuse imagery, producing content that denies crimes against humanity and fraudulent extraction of data.

On the day of the raid in February, Mr. Musk was summoned to meet in April with the investigating judge and discuss the potential charges. Such an invitation is a regular part of a criminal investigation in the French system, during which people in Mr. Musk’s position can “present their position on the facts and the compliance measures they plan to implement,” the prosecutor’s office said at the time.

Mr. Musk’s absence was expected after he aggressively denounced the investigation,

calling it a “political attack.”

The prosecutor’s office did not announce any immediate legal consequence for his failure to attend. Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

The investigation started amid French concerns with X’s algorithm, the digital process that organizes data on the platform, and then expanded after further accusations that Grok, X’s A.I. chatbot, was spreading Holocaust denial claims and sexual deepfakes.

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