Elon Sees Dead People

Along with a whole lot of fraud that has no basis in fact. So what’s he up to, exactly?

Just when you think the DOGE infection of our financial payments and other government systems can’t get worse, it just did. The New York Times reported that Elon Musk has embedded one of his teams inside the Social Security Administration, with all our personal financial information in its databases now likely available to them.

It’s so bad that a top Social Security official resigned on Monday after DOGE sought access to personal data for millions of Americans. That sounds a lot like what happened inside of the Fiscal Services Bureau and USAID.

Once inside our Social Security systems, Musk wasted no time spreading outright lies about 150-year old recipients and millions of dead people in the system—unsupported claims that were repeated by the White House and amplified by right-wing media outlets.

We need to get him out, that much is clear to all sane persons. But to do this, we also need to call him out. Specifically, we need to expose his lies and why he’s making them.

Musk made three big false claims about Social Security fraud, both online and during that bizarre Oval Office presser where he acted like the president, with his toddler seated at the desk beside him the whole time. (Musk also brought his child X.) Today, let’s look at each, then talk about why he’s lying so openly and brazenly about non-existent fraud.

The reasons are quite chilling.

No, there aren’t millions of 150-year old fraudulent Social Security recipients

Musk made a startling claim during his Oval Office press conference last Wednesday. He told the nation that there were 150-year olds in the system who were still receiving Social Security payments.

“It’s just common sense. It’s not draconian, or radical,” Musk began. “Just a cursory examination of Social Security,” he continued, sounding very much like a guy who thinks he knows everything but actually understands nothing, “you know, we’ve got people in there who are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.”

Here’s the thing. The system was written decades ago using COBOL, a language that none of his teenage plus programmers likely know much about. Older, experienced programmers would know, however, that finding 150-year olds in the system isn’t evidence of fraud.

In COBOL, dates are referenced to May 20, 1875, when the world set the international metric standard. If a recipient’s birthdate is missing or incomplete, the system defaults to that date, meaning 150 years ago. The reason there are so many “150-year olds” is because there are many people, especially older, rural citizens, whose exact birthday isn’t known.

No, there aren’t millions of dead centenarians receiving Social Security checks

Second, Musk claimed that millions of checks are paid out to people over 100. Here is his post on Twitter that had some 69 million views as of this writing:

His conclusion looking at these numbers is that tens of millions of people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security payments from the government, when most of them are dead. My goodness, that sounds terrible! How could this be happening?!

The thing is, it isn’t. Yes, there are millions of people in the database well over the possible lifespan of a human. But no, they are not being paid anything. As Capitol Hunters noted on Twitter, in 2023, there was an inspector general report about the Social Security Administration’s maintenance of death records. And it directly addressed the very issue that Musk claims to have unearthed. Check out the emphasized parts:

In 2015, we reported that SSA had not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies of age 112 or older and were likely deceased. At the time, only 35 known living individuals worldwide were age 112 or older, however, SSA’s Numident included 6.5 million numberholders age 112 or older whose record did not contain death information. Therefore, the numberholders’ information did not appear in the full DMF. We recommended SSA add death information to approximately 1.5 million Numident records where the numberholders’ death information appeared in SSA payment records. We also recommended SSA determine whether it could efficiently correct the approximately 5 million remaining records. SSA agreed to explore the legal and technical feasibility, as well as the cost, to establish an automated process to update the millions of Numident records for individuals who appeared to be alive and age 112 or older, but ultimately decided not to update these records.

That’s right! The government already noted ten years ago that information on 6.5 million people age 112 or older did not contain death information, and it addressed 1.5 million of those, leaving 5 million unaddressed due to the high cost of doing so.

These people are not receiving Social Security checks, as Musk claims. The report confirmed this in its “Results of Review.” There were some 18.9 million or so people in the system identified to have been born before 1920. However, “[o]fficials also noted that almost none of the 18.9 million numberholders currently receive SSA payments.”

Publicly available information confirms how many people from each age bracket were paid. This is no big secret or conspiracy. Anyone can look this up at the administration’s web site, as economist Justin Wolfers did when tweeting in response to Musk.

Look at the second to the bottom line, “99 & over.” It shows that the government sent only 89,106 checks in December to centenarians. As reporter James Surowiecki noted, that’s actually fewer than the number of centenarians alive in the U.S. according to the most recent census.

No, undocumented migrants are not receiving Social Security

As a topper to all this, Musk pushed a false and racist “great replacement” theory about migrants being lured to the U.S. with the promise of benefits like Social Security. He tweeted that the “real reason” Democrats are upset with fraud investigations is that “they are using your taxpayer money as handouts to attract and retain ILLEGAL immigrants. Their future voters. That’s what it’s all about. Truth.”

Musk wouldn’t know the “Truth” if it bit him in the X.

Undocumented migrants are not entitled to Social Security benefits or federal medical benefits such as Medicare and Medicaid. They have no real Social Security numbers because they were never issued them. Far more often than not, they pay into a system that they have no ability later to be paid out from. And to the extent they have fake Social Security numbers, they use these so they can get jobs, without any expectation that they will ever see that money again.

As reporter Matthew Yglesias notes, “The Social Security Administration polices more rigorously when people try to get money than when they try to pay taxes, so the biggest source of Social Security fraud is immigrants illegally paying into the system with spoofed SSNs.”

In fact, the Bipartisan Policy Center found that in 2022, unauthorized workers paid in a whopping $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, but were ineligible to claim the benefits of those.

Democrats and all sane Americans are “upset” with Musk’s fraud investigations because he is accessing personal financial data with no legal authorization and is making up claims about massive fraud.

So why would he do that?

A dangerous gambit

Musk often makes wild claims that turn out to be completely false. Remember his nonsensical claim of $50 million in condoms to “Gaza” when in fact this was part of an AIDS prevention program in Mozambique? Musk admitted that he will “sometimes” say “incorrect” things. But let’s get one thing clear: Musk has no interest in truth or accuracy.

If he did, he would have paused to consider that there could be a null value in COBOL that might readily explain the high prevalence of 150-year olds in the Social Security system. He never stopped to consider that there might be some very obvious, plausible reason other than fraud to explain all those impossibly old people. Musk sees evidence of fraud everywhere because that’s what he wants to believe and report out on.

Had Musk even bothered to read the 19-page inspector general’s report on millions of dead people in the system, or even just the executive summaries on Page 2 as I did this morning in about a minute, he would have realized that his conspiratorial thinking was making him say “incorrect” things to tens of millions of gullible Americans once more.

But Musk isn’t really interested in the truth, or even in finding fraud. If he were, he would brought in forensic accountants and not young software coders.

Musk is lying to the American public in order to justify deep cuts to Social Security, all in the name of eliminating fraud. It’s a smokescreen for what he is really after. He also wants to claim credit for purging deceased recipients, even though the government already does this routinely, in order to justify his continued access to the systems he is rapidly taking over.

The legacy press is doing a lousy job letting the public know that Musk’s statements are bogus and easily disprovable. They’re doing an even worse job explaining that Musk has a nefarious agenda behind all his false fraud claims. That means it’s up to us independent reporters and writers to get the word out, and for that we need your help amplifying the truth.

If we keep letting him lie, the public will continue to hand him the keys to the kingdom, all in the name of solving non-existent, wholly fabricated problems. We need to see this clearly. Just as fascists have done throughout history, Musk’s claims of rampant fraud are a false flag operation on a massive scale. And he’s busily duping our whole body politic into going along.