Fraud, Lies, and 20 Million Names? Musk Just Gave Social Security a Hard Reality Check!

Billionaire entrepreneur and government adviser Elon Musk has made a shocking discovery—more than 20 million people in the Social Security database are listed as over 100 years old, yet still considered alive.

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!” Musk posted on X late Sunday. His post included a chart displaying ages ranging from zero to an astounding 369 years old.

The Tesla and X CEO took a jab at the absurdity of the data. “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he joked. He also warned that “there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security [sic] numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history.”

While Musk’s post went viral, this issue has been known for years. A July 2023 audit by the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) inspector general found that 18.9 million individuals were listed as 100 years or older but had no recorded date of death.

Official census data, however, showed only 86,000 centenarians living in the U.S. at the time.

A similar audit in 2015 uncovered 6.5 million people marked as alive despite being over 112 years old. In reality, only 35 people worldwide had reached that age.

The auditors concluded that “almost none” of these cases involved people actually collecting Social Security payments, even though some records identified individuals born in the 1800s as still alive.

The 2023 audit found that roughly 18.4 million of these individuals had not received any benefits or reported income for 50 years. The most likely explanation? They were long deceased.

“We believe it likely SSA did not receive or record most of the 18.9 million individuals’ death information primarily because the individuals died decades ago—before the use of electronic death reporting,” the report stated.

Despite the massive data errors, only 44,000 of these individuals were receiving Social Security benefits, and just 13 of them were supposedly over 112 years old.

Even the world’s oldest man at the time, Salustiano Sanchez-Blazquez, a New York-based musician and coal miner, died at 112—months after the first audit in 2015.

The audits also revealed another startling fact: 531 million Social Security numbers are currently in circulation. Some have been exploited for identity fraud.

A 2015 report found that employers or self-employed individuals reported a staggering $3.1 billion in earnings using Social Security numbers that did not belong to them.

Cato Institute Vice President Alex Nowrasteh responded to Musk’s post by offering a different perspective. He pointed out that many of these questionable Social Security numbers belonged to “illegal immigrants paying in, not fraudulent recipients taking out.”

“By all means, clean up SSA and mark those people as deceased. But the cost of doing so is less revenue going into Social Security,” Nowrasteh explained. “Maybe that’s fine, SS should be shut down anyway, but that is a downside.”

Speaking to The Post, Nowrasteh elaborated that many migrants use stolen identities from deceased individuals who have not been officially marked as dead in the Social Security system.

Identity fraud and identity “loans” are widespread in underground markets. With just an ID and a Social Security number, many undocumented immigrants can secure employment.

Observers speculate that Musk may have been referencing a Social Security database known as “Numident,” which tracks every Social Security number issued since 1936.

A former SSA employee explained to journalist Jesse Singal that some people end up with multiple Social Security numbers. “Occasionally because they’re committing fraud, but more usually because they’ve had fraud committed against them and they were issued a new clean number.”

The employee also noted that many temporary immigrant workers who received a Social Security number but later left the U.S. remain listed in the database.

The problem isn’t exclusive to Social Security. Other government agencies have also made erroneous payments to deceased individuals.

Under the Biden administration, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation mistakenly paid $127 million to a Teamsters’ pension fund that included nearly 3,500 dead members. The agency later settled with the Department of Justice to return the money.

The U.S. Social Security system dates back to 1936, with the first recorded recipient, Ida May Fuller, collecting payments from 1940 until her death in 1975.

Despite the serious concerns raised, the Social Security Administration has yet to respond to Musk’s claims.