Elon Musk said on several occasions that her so-called project of the Ministry of Effectiveness of the Government (DOGE) had discovered massive government fraud when she alleged that 150-year-olds claimed social security benefits.
But Musk did not provide any evidence to support his assertions, and the experts quickly stressed that it is probably only a quirk of the old coding language of the decades that underpin government payment systems.
Musk first made the complaints during his Press conference of the Oval Office Last week, when he said that a “superficial social security exam, and we brought people there to 150 years. Now do you know someone who is 150? I don’t know. They should be in the book Guinness records … so this is a case where I think they are probably dead. »»
Although no evidence was produced to support this assertion, it was taken up by right-right commentators, mainly on the own Musk X platform, as well as to be reported credible by the pro-Trump media.
Computer Programs Quickly Claimed that the 150 Figure was not Evidence of Fraud, But Rather the Result of A Weird Quirk of the Social Security Administration’s Benefits System, Which was Largely was in Cobol, A 60-Year-Oold Programming Language that Undergirds ssa’s databases as as well as systems of many other American government agencies.
Cobol is rarely used today, and as such, the framework of young Musk engineers may well not be familiar.
Because Cobol has no type of date, certain implementations are based rather on a system by which all the dates are coded at a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875Because it was the date of an international conference of standards which takes place in Paris, known as the “Mère Convention”.
These default systems at the point of reference when a date of birth is missing or incomplete, which means that all these entries in 2025 would display an age of 150 years.
This is only a possible explanation for what Doge would have found. Musk could also have simply sought the own SSA website, which explains that since September 2015, the agency has automatically stopped payments of services When someone reaches the age of 115.
However, Monday morning, Musk doubled, displaying a screenshot of what he claims to be figures for “the social security database” to X, writing that “the number of people in each bucket with The field of death takes place on False! ”
The figures have suggested that more than 10 million people over 120 years old receive services.
“Perhaps Twilight is real and there are many vampires that collect Social Security,” wrote Musk.
The Musk database has drawn screenshots from nearly 400 million people, which represents more than five times the number of people benefiting from services in 2024, according to the The own SSA website. It is also much more than the entire American population.
The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of dead people from dead people is probably distinct from a potential cobol error, not new. A report written by the Inspector General of the SSA in 2023 found that 98% of the 100 years or over in social security databases receive no advantage. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.
