With President Donald Trump sitting quietly to his left in the Oval Office last week, Elon Musk offered White House reporters an example of the sort of fraud that is the ostensible target of his arm of the administration.
Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
After a “cursory examination of Social Security,” he said, “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150?” This, he added, was “a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. That’s my guess. Or should be very famous. One of the two.”
Musk, you will recall, is a tech guy. And it didn’t take long for other tech guys to point out a probable explanation for those 150-year-olds, one that Musk should probably have considered: It was what a data error in an old system often looks like — a function of date values being left blank in a database or outdated records or both.
ADVERTISING
Skip to end of carousel
End of carousel
But Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.
Follow Philip Bump
“There are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” he wrote in a response to a question about his allegation. “This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Musk’s numbers were still wrong or deceptive or, again, both. The Social Security Administration (SSA) publishes data on the number of recipients of retirement benefits by age, and there are not 20 million-plus people aged 100 or older getting benefits. Last June, there were about 86,000, including 99-year-olds. (The Census Bureau estimates that there were about 134,000 Americans aged 99 and up in 2023.)
Musk’s purported discovery of all of these people 150 years old or older listed on the SSA’s books wasn’t even a novel one. The department’s inspector general — a nonpartisan government official whose mandate actually is to identify fraud and waste — released a report in 2015 that beat Musk to the punch. There were millions of probably-dead people in the SSA system, it noted, but “records indicated that only 13 beneficiaries were likely [identified as being] age 112 or older.”
The inspector general recommended changes that would remove those too-old Americans from the system. Changes were made, but as a follow-up IG report from 2023 noted, the SSA felt that a broad effort to update records for those nonexistent elderly Americans would be “costly to implement … [and] of little benefit to the agency.” The June 2024 data indicates that the SSA paid out less than $150 million to people aged 99 and older — less than one-fifth of 1 percent of SSA benefits paid to retirees.
Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
After a “cursory examination of Social Security,” he said, “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150?” This, he added, was “a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. That’s my guess. Or should be very famous. One of the two.”
Musk, you will recall, is a tech guy. And it didn’t take long for other tech guys to point out a probable explanation for those 150-year-olds, one that Musk should probably have considered: It was what a data error in an old system often looks like — a function of date values being left blank in a database or outdated records or both.
ADVERTISING
Skip to end of carousel
Sign up for the How to Read This Chart newsletter
Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, Opinions columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.End of carousel
But Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.
Follow Philip Bump
“There are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” he wrote in a response to a question about his allegation. “This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Musk’s numbers were still wrong or deceptive or, again, both. The Social Security Administration (SSA) publishes data on the number of recipients of retirement benefits by age, and there are not 20 million-plus people aged 100 or older getting benefits. Last June, there were about 86,000, including 99-year-olds. (The Census Bureau estimates that there were about 134,000 Americans aged 99 and up in 2023.)
Musk’s purported discovery of all of these people 150 years old or older listed on the SSA’s books wasn’t even a novel one. The department’s inspector general — a nonpartisan government official whose mandate actually is to identify fraud and waste — released a report in 2015 that beat Musk to the punch. There were millions of probably-dead people in the SSA system, it noted, but “records indicated that only 13 beneficiaries were likely [identified as being] age 112 or older.”
The inspector general recommended changes that would remove those too-old Americans from the system. Changes were made, but as a follow-up IG report from 2023 noted, the SSA felt that a broad effort to update records for those nonexistent elderly Americans would be “costly to implement … [and] of little benefit to the agency.” The June 2024 data indicates that the SSA paid out less than $150 million to people aged 99 and older — less than one-fifth of 1 percent of SSA benefits paid to retirees.
