Elon Musk has repeatedly argued that his so-called Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project discovered a massive government fraud when a 150-year-old child claimed Social Security benefits.
However, Musk has not provided evidence to support his claim, and experts quickly point out that this is very likely a habit of decades-old coding language that underpins government payment systems. did.
Musk was the first to make a claim between him. Oval office press conference Last week, when he claimed it was a “rough social security investigation,” we got 150-year-olds out there. So, do you know someone of 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness World Records book… so that’s a case where they think they’re probably dead. ”
No evidence has been created to support this claim, but it has been featured and reported online primarily by right-wing commentators on Musk’s own X platform Reliable by Pro Trump Media outlet.
The computer programmer quickly argued that the number 150 is not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a strange quirk in the Social Security Agency’s benefits system. Systems from many other US government agencies.
Cobol is rarely used today, so masked young engineer executives may be new to it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely on systems with all dates Coded at the reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875this was the date of the International Standards Setting Conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention Dumatre.”
These systems default to reference points when the date of birth is missing or incomplete. That is, all entries for 2025 indicate age 150.
This is just one possible explanation of what Doge allegedly found. Mask could have simply looked up SSA’s own website. When someone reaches 115 years old.
However, on Monday morning, Musk doubled and posted a screenshot of what he claimed from the “Social Security Database” to X, “The number of people in buckets of each age was set to false, with death fields set “I’m here!”
The numbers suggest that over 100 million people over the age of 120 are gathering profits.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are many vampires who collect social security,” Musk wrote.
Database Masks adopted screenshots from around 400 million people. This is more than five times more than those who received benefits in 2024. SSA’s own website. It is also much larger than the entire US population.
The fact that the social security system includes millions of entries from people who have died may not be news, unlike potential errors caused by COBOL. Report written by an inspector at the SSA in 2023 It turns out that 98% of people over the age of 100 in the Social Security Database are not receiving profit. The report added that the database is too expensive to update.
