Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so -called so -called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) The project had uncovered massive government fraud when claimed 150-year-olds demanded social security benefits.
But Musk has not presented any evidence of underpinning his claims, and experts quickly pointed out that this is very likely only a peculiarity of the decades of coding language that underpins state payment systems.
Musk first made the claims during his Press conference Oval Office Last week, when he claimed, a “fleeting social security examination, and we have people there in 150 years. Do you know someone who is 150? I don’t know. You should be the world records in the Guinness book … So that’s a case in which I think you are probably dead. “
While no evidence was presented to underpin this claim, it was picked up online by the right commentators, mainly on Musk’s own X-platform, as well as reported Credible by Pro-Trump media.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 number did not prove fraud, but the result of a strange peculiarity of the service system of social security management, which was largely written Cobol, a 60-year programming language This underpins the databases from SSA and systems of many other US government authorities.
Cobol is rarely used today, and as such, the Musk squad of young engineers may not be familiar with it.
Since Cobol does not have a date of date, some implementations are based on a system in which all data are Coded to a reference point. That is most frequently used May 20, 1875How this was the date of an international standard conference in Paris, known as “Convention du Mètre”.
By default, these systems to the reference point when a date of birth is missing or is incomplete, which means that all of these entries in 2025 would show an age of 150 years.
This is just a possible explanation for what Doge supposedly found. Musk could have simply looked up on the SSA website, which explains that the agency has automatically stopped the service payments since September 2015 When someone reached the age of 115.
On Monday morning, however, Muschus doubled and published a screenshot about the figures from “the social security database” to X and wrote that “the number of people at any age with the death field on false!”
The numbers indicate that over 10 million people aged over 120 advantages.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are many vampires that collect social security,” wrote Musk.
The database musk has taken the screenshot from the almost 400 million people listed, which has more than the five times the number of people who received advantages in 2024 Ssa’s own website. It is also significantly more than the entire US population.
The fact that the social security system contains millions of entries from people from people probably differs from a potential mistake caused by Cobol and also not from news. A report by the SSA General Inspector in 2023 found that 98 percent of people aged 100 or older in the social security databases receive no services. The report added that the database was not updated, as this would cost too much money.
