Elon Musk repeatedly claims what he calls Ministry of Government Efficiency (DOGE) The project has discovered huge government fraud when the project claims that the 150-year-old claims social security benefits.
But Musk provided no evidence to support his claim, and experts were quick to point out that it is likely just a quirk of decades-old coding languages that underlie government payment systems.
Musk in his Oval Office Press Conference Last week, when he claimed “a rough review of social security, we have 150-year-old people there. Now, do you know anyone has 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness World Records, so I think they Maybe dead.”
While no evidence was generated to support this claim, it was received online by right-wing commentators (mainly on Musk’s own X platform) and reported Pro-Trump media is trustworthy.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that 150 numbers were not evidence of fraud, but the result of the weird quirks of the Social Security Bureau’s welfare system, which was written mainly in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language This is the SSA database and a system from many other U.S. government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, so it is likely that Musk’s young engineer cadres are unfamiliar with it.
Since COBOL has no date type, some implementations rely on systems with all dates Encode to reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875because this is the date of the International Standards Conference held in Paris, it is called the Convention.
When a missing or incomplete date of birth, these systems default to reference points, meaning that all these entries are 150 years old in 2025.
This is just one possible explanation for what is allegedly discovered. Musk can also just look up SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015, the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments. When anyone reaches 115.
But on Monday morning, Musk doubled, releasing screenshots of his claims to be a number from the “Social Security Database” to X, and wrote: “The number of people of every age group will die in the realm of the field of death. Set to false! ”
These data show that more than 1 million people over 120 are receiving benefits.
“Maybe Twilight is real, there are a lot of vampires collecting social security,” Musk wrote.
According to screenshots from the database, Musk took screenshots from nearly 400 million people listed, which is more than five times the number of benefits received in 2024. SSA’s own website. It is also more than the entire U.S. population.
The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries for deaths may be different from the mistakes caused by potential COBOLs, nor is it news. Report written by SSA Inspector General in 2023 It was found that 98% of people over 100 years of age did not receive any benefits in the Social Security database. The report added that the database will not be updated because it will cost too much money to do so.
