Elon Musk repeatedly claimed that his so-called project of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) uncovered massive government fraud when he claimed that 150-year-olds claimed the benefits of social security.
But Musk did not provide any evidence to backup its claims, and experts quickly pointed out that it is probably just a peculiarity of the decades-old coding language that supports government payment systems.
Musk made the claims for the first time at his press conference of the Oval Office last week, when he claimed that a “volatile investigation of social security, and we got people there 150 years old. Do you know someone who is 150 now? I don’t know. They have to be in the Guinness Book of World Records … so it’s a case where I think they’re probably dead. ‘
Although no evidence has been provided to backup this claim, it was picked up online by the right-wing commentators, mainly on Musk’s own X-platform, and is also credible by pro-Trump media.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150-digit was not proof of fraud, but rather the result of a strange peculiarity of the benefits system of the Social Security Administration, largely written in Cobol, a 60-year-old Programming language that underlies the databases of SSA as well as systems of many other US government agencies.
Cobol is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s framework of young engineers may not be familiar with it.
Since Cobol does not have a date type, some implementations rather rely on a system through which all dates are coded at a reference point. The most used is May 20, 1875, as it was the date of an international conference for standards held in Paris, known as the ‘Convention du More’.
These systems are standard at the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, which means that all the entries would show an age of 150 in 2025.
This is just one possible explanation for what is alleged to have found. Musk could also have simply detected the SSA’s own website, which explains that the agency automatically stops benefit payments since September 2015 if someone reaches the age of 115.
However, Muskus doubled on Monday and placed a screenshot of what he claimed to be figures from the “Social Security database” to X, and wrote that “the number of people in each age bucket was set up with the death field!”
The figures have suggested that more than 10 million people over 120 benefits collect.
“Maybe twilight is genuine and there are many vampires who collect social security,” Musk wrote.
The Database Musk took the screenshot of nearly 400 million people, who are more than five times the number of people receiving benefits in 2024, according to the SSA’s own website. It is also significantly more than the entire American population.
The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from dead people is probably distinguished from a potential Cobol-caused mistake, nor news. In a report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023, it was found that 98 percent from the age of 100 or older in the social security databases received no benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.