No, 150-year-olds do not collect social security benefits

Elon Musk repeatedly claims that his so -called Ministry of Government Efficiency (Doge) The project revealed massive government fraud when it is alleged that 150-year-olds claim social security.

But Musk has not provided evidence to support their claims, and experts have quickly indicated that it is very likely only quirky for decades of encoding tongue that underlies government payment systems.

Musk first made allegations during his Oval Office press conference Last week, when he claims that a “marked survey of social security and we have people there who are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness World Records Book … So this is a case where I think they are probably dead. “

Although no evidence was presented to support this claim, it was selected by the right -wing commentators online, mainly on Musk’s own platform, and reported that it was reported reliable by Pro-Troump MediaS

Computer programmers quickly claim that the number of 150 is not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a strange strangeness of the Social Security Administration Compensation System, which is largely written in COBOL, 60-year-old programming language This is subjected to SSA databases, as well as systems from many other US government agencies.

Cobol is rarely used today and as such a Musk frame by young engineers may not be familiar with it.

As Cobol has no date type, some conversions rely on a system where all dates coded at a reference pointS The most commonly used is May 20, 1875As this was the date of an international conference to set standards held in Paris, known as the Du Mètre Convention.

These default systems to the reference point when the date of birth is missing or incomplete, which means that all these records in 2025 will show the age of 150.

This is just one possible explanation for what the dog has found. Musk could also simply look for SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped payments for benefits When someone reaches the age of 115S

However, Musk doubled on Monday morning by posting a screenshot of what claims to be numbers from the “Social Security Database” of the X, writing that “the number of people in every era with the death bucket set FALSE! “

The numbers suggest that over 10 million people over the age of 120 are collecting benefits.

“Maybe dusk is real and there are many vampires who collect social security,” Musk writes.

The Musk database took the screenshot of nearly 400 million people listed, which is more than five times more than the number of people receiving benefits in 2024, according to SSA’s own websiteS It is also significantly more than the entire US population.

The fact that the social security system contains millions of records of people who are dead is probably different from the potential error caused by Cobol and is also not news. A report written by the SSA General Inspector in 2023 They find that 98 percent of those aged 100 or more in the social security databases do not receive any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.