'They're mentally retarded': Elon Musk slams Paris prosecutors who claim Grok scandal was staged to boost X and xAI
Multibillionaire Elon Musk lashed out at prosecutors in Paris after they advanced the hypothesis that the Grok sex-image scandal was deliberately provoked to artificially inflate the value of companies X and xAI, in the context of a possible 2026 IPO of an entity resulting from the merger with SpaceX.
“They are mentally retarded”, he commented in French in a post on X, as a reaction to an AFP story dedicated to this referral, notes News.ro.
🇫🇷 French prosecutors said Saturday they had alerted US authorities to a suspicion that tech tycoon Elon Musk had encouraged the controversy over sexualised deepfakes on X to “artificially” increase the value of his company.
➡️ https://t.co/G1hRRy3jXN pic.twitter.com/ABzXVnngId— AFP News Agency (@AFP) March 21, 2026
“The controversy sparked by the sexual deepfakes generated by Grok (X's AI agent) could have been created intentionally, to artificially value X and xAI companies”, in the perspective of “the June 2026 stock exchange listing of the new entity resulting from the merger between SpaceX and xAI, in the context of X company's obvious loss of speed”, explained the prosecutor's office to AFP on Saturday.
French authorities have already launched an investigation into the X platform amid allegations that its algorithm was used to interfere in French politics, as well as Grok's dissemination of Holocaust denial and sexually explicit “deepfakes.”
The AI-based chatbot, Grok, has its own account on the social network X, which allows users to interact with it.
For a while, users could tag the bot in posts to request image generation and editing, receiving the image in a response from Grok. Many sent Grok photos of women or tagged him in replies to posts of women's photos, giving him instructions such as “dress her in a bikini” or “undress her.”
It generated about three million images of sexual content — mostly of women, but also 23,000 that appeared to depict children — in 11 days, the Center for Combating Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit monitoring organization, said in late January.
Musk's posts, analyzed by prosecutors
Le Monde pointed out “several posts by Musk, published amid controversy, which prosecutors interpret as incitement to generate images without consent.”
“The billionaire posted several messages expressing his delight, using numerous emojis, at the 'undressing' capabilities of his AI engine, even sharing a picture of himself in which his chatbot showed him wearing a bikini,” reported Le Monde.
Average daily downloads of Grok's app worldwide rose 72% from January 1-19 compared to the same period in December, the Washington Post noted, citing market analysis firm Sensor Tower.
French authorities last month summoned Musk to a “voluntary interview” and raided the local offices of his social network, in what Musk called a “political attack.”
Both the UK and the European Union have also opened investigations into the creation of sexualized deepfakes.
