What exactly did Musk say?
Before diving into exactly what Elon Musk said, it’s important to first give some context.
President Trump appointed Musk as head of DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency (though the White House claims he’s only a senior advisor to the president).
Digging through the Social Security Administration's (SSA) databases, the DOGE seems to have allegedly found one that included more than 19 million people who were at least 100 years old with no official death date.
Last week, Musk posted a screenshot of the database on X and joked that there are “a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,”
During a press conference in the Oval Office last week, Musk went further to claim that older Americans, 150-year-olds, were still apparently claiming Social Security benefits.
“We got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't know,” he said.
While Social Security fraud may be a real issue, Musk’s claims may be somewhat exaggerated. In other words, his claims of rampant fraud may not be as bad as he’s making it seem.
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Learn MoreAre the allegations true?
The truth is that there aren’t hundreds of millions of people over 100 falsely claiming Social Security benefits.
Where the misunderstanding of the data that Musk posted on X came from is the software system used by Social Security to store certain types of data.
The programming language used, COBOL (first reported by WIRED), does not have a date type in its data. As such, any entries that don't have birthdates will automatically default to a date that's over 150 years old.
What's more, the SSA Office of the Inspector General has published several reports showing that SSA hasn't created a new system to accurately input death details in its database. This affects around 18.9 million of Americans who were both on or before 1920. The report stresses that it doesn't mean these folks have been receiving any benefits.
A July 2023 report states that anyone who is over the age of 115 in the database automatically stops receiving Social Security payments.
Fast Company reported that Musk was looking at the wrong database in the first place.
Instead, what Musk was looking at was the Numerical Identification System, a database of every issued Social Security number, not people who are receiving benefits. Even if there is no death date in this database, it doesn't offer a clear picture as to who is still getting checks.
There is a separate database showing who is receiving benefits. The 89,106 people that do, as of December 2024, who are at least 99 years old is still a far cry from the millions that Musk claims.
Even if Musk’s claims aren’t true, there is Social Security fraud. But it may not be as rampant as what people may think. The Office of the Inspector General’s report in July 2024 showed that SSA paid around 1%, or $71.8 billion in improper payments. These were mostly overpayments to those who are still living.
In January, the U.S. reclaimed $31 million in federal payments that went to people who were already dead, though not all of these were Social Security benefits.
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