Elon Musk responded to a deepening French criminal investigation into his social media platform X with homophobic insults directed at French magistrates, prompting a new legal complaint and drawing support from an unlikely ally: Telegram founder Pavel Durov.
Homophobic Tirade Follows Probe Escalation
On Friday, May 8, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that an investigating judge had been formally appointed to probe X, xAI, Musk, and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino over allegations including complicity in the distribution of child sexual abuse imagery and the creation of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes using Grok, X’s AI chatbot. Musk responded the same day with a post on X written in French: “They’re faker than a chocolate euro and gayer than a flamingo in a neon tutu!”
It was not Musk’s first attack on French authorities. After a raid on X’s Paris offices in February, he had called French magistrates “mentally retarded” in a separate post.
French anti-discrimination group Stop Homophobie filed a legal complaint against Musk on Saturday for “public insults against a group of people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity,” according to the group’s lawyer, Étienne Deshoulières.
Durov Rallies Behind Musk
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov weighed in over the weekend with a series of posts on X accusing the French government of hypocrisy. “The French government is accusing X of the very things the French government itself is doing,” Durov wrote, listing allegations of illegal data collection and surveillance. He called the probe “an immoral assault by the French state” and urged “the free world” to stand with Musk, adding that “Telegram supports our brothers and sisters from X in their fight for our freedom”.
Durov, who was himself detained by French authorities in 2024 over content moderation failures on Telegram, suggested France was attempting to silence platforms ahead of what he described as a coming political shift in 2027.
Transatlantic Standoff
The confrontation has exposed a widening rift between the United States and France over tech regulation. The U.S. Department of Justice declined French requests for assistance in the investigation, stating in an April letter that the probe “seeks to use the criminal legal system in France to regulate a public square for the free expression of ideas” in violation of the First Amendment, according to The Wall Street Journal. An xAI official told the Journal the company was “grateful to the Justice Department” and called the investigation “baseless”.
The French investigation, which began in January 2025 over concerns about algorithmic manipulation of political discourse, has expanded repeatedly — first to cover Holocaust denial by Grok, then to address a flood of AI-generated deepfakes, and most recently to include child sexual abuse material. French prosecutors have also alerted the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to the possibility that the Grok deepfake controversy was deliberately engineered to inflate the market value of X and xAI.
