The Met May Have Millions in Stolen Art. It’s Not Waiting to Be Asked to Return It.
The museum is taking the lead on re-evaluating its art and artifacts to determine where these works came from in the first place.
4 min
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late February, an increasingly familiar scene played out: A museum was restituting a work of art, giving back something from its collection to the place where it originated—in this case, Greece. The announcement, however, was more celebratory than sheepish. It was being done with the fanfare more often associated with acquiring a great object rather than returning one. That’s because, in this case, the Met itself launched the inquiry into the sculpture’s origin.
The work in question was a small bronze sculpture of the head of a griffin, a mythological creature, made in the 7th century B.C. It had been on display at the Met since 1972. Max Hollein, the Met’s director and CEO, spoke to the assembled crowd. The piece, he said, “could not have legitimately left” Greece.
Over the last few years, museums have had to respond to inquiries—sometimes as part of legal claims that can come from countries or former owners, or are initiated by U.S. law enforcement—about works that were stolen, illegally excavated, exported or traded improperly.
But with the griffin head, the Met didn’t wait to be asked. Greek authorities weren’t attempting to reclaim it. Instead, in a turn that shows how the process of repatriation and restitution has changed, the Met took the initiative to investigate how the griffin head got into its collection. The museum found it had disappeared from the Archaeological Museum of Olympia in the 1930s.
Last year the Met appointed Lucian Simmons, a lawyer and former Sotheby’s executive, to be its first-ever head of provenance. He leads a team of 10 full-time researchers, which the Met says is the biggest staff dedicated to this task at any museum.
Simmons acts as “air-traffic control,” he said, providing support, supervision and coordination to the provenance research specialists, who are embedded within the museum’s departments.
Simmons’s broader philosophy is that more sunlight is better when it comes to determining pieces’ back stories. “We need to know the truth,” he said. “Sometimes it’s uncomfortable.”
With these claims, the stakes are often high: In 2022, local and federal authorities seized 27 objects worth a reported $13 million from the Met and returned them to Italy and Egypt, their countries of origin.
Provenance research, or finding a comprehensive record of an art object’s previous ownership and history, is “core museum work” these days, said Hollein, certainly when it comes to vetting new acquisitions. But now, more museums are examining the back story of objects they’ve had for decades and then taking action based on what they find.
“Museums used to take a wait-and-see approach,” said William M. Griswold, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the chair of the cultural property task force of the Association of Art Museum Directors. “Now, they are much more proactive about investigating and finding ways to resolve issues that pertain to provenance.”
Hollein noted how much the landscape of looking into a work’s provenance had changed. “Forty, fifty years ago, nobody cared about documents. It’s not because everything was illegal. That’s just not how it worked.”
The Met has more than 1.5 million objects in its collection, six million visitors a year and an endowment of $4.5 billion.
With the griffin head, Met staffers flagged in 2018 that there were issues, and Hollein then reached out to the Directorate of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage of Greece. The mystery was never solved definitively, and hence the museum could not be sure the piece met its standards.
But it’s not gone for good. The bronze is coming back to the Met as a loan next year.
When the billionaire Leonard N. Stern, a real-estate developer and heir of the pet-product company Hartz Mountain, wanted to give the Met a collection of Bronze Age sculptures from the Cycladic Islands, which are now part of Greece, the Met couldn’t determine the art’s origin.
“Ninety percent of Cycladic art comes from unknown contexts, and a lot of it probably comes out of tombs,” said Seán Hemingway, the Met’s chief curator of Greek and Roman art.
Instead of turning down the gift, the Met worked with the Greek government and the Museum of Cycladic Art to establish a long-term partnership. The works will be owned by Greece, but most will be on display at the Met for the next 25 years, and the country will loan other Cycladic art to the museum. Separately, Stern is supporting extensive joint research and conservation projects.
Hollein said the reaction to such an offer had changed completely. “Maybe like 40 years ago, it would have been, ‘We’ll take it,’” he said. “Then maybe 10 years ago, it would have been, ‘It’s impossible for us to get right.’
Sometimes, the outcomes of provenance research don’t result in a piece being returned, as with Jean-Louis Lemoyne’s “La Crainte des Traits de l’Amour” (1739-40), a Rococo marble sculpture in the Met’s Petrie Court depicting a woman startled by a tiny Cupid.
Last year, an associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department flagged a gap in its ownership records. Upon further investigation, the museum confirmed that the sculpture, once owned by a branch of the Rothschild banking family, had been seized during World War II, a fact previously unknown to the museum. After being taken from the family, “it was put on a truck by Nazis in Paris,” Simmons said. “It was taken to the Jeu de Paume and then shipped to Berlin.”
Somehow, the work found its way back to the Rothschilds, who later sold it, and the Met bought it from a dealer, so it didn’t clearly call for restitution. Instead, new information explaining this history will be added to the placard describing the work, part of a new New York state legal requirement that requires New York museums to publicize when an artwork was stolen by the German Army.
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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From farm-to-table Thai to fairy-lit mango trees and Coral Sea vistas, Port Douglas has award-winning dining and plenty of tropical charm on the side.
