French prosecutors suspect Musk encouraged deepfakes row to inflate X value
BNN Bloomberg
French prosecutors said Saturday they had alerted U.S. 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.
PARIS - French prosecutors said Saturday they had alerted U.S. 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.
The social media network’s Grok AI chatbot stirred outrage earlier this year over it generating images of women and girls in minimal attire without their consent.
“The controversy sparked by sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok (X’s AI) may have been deliberately generated in order to artificially boost the value of companies X and X AI,” 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 Space X and X AI, it added.
The prosecutor’s office said it had on Tuesday reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as French lawyers at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a financial market regulation body, to share its concerns.
