WASHINGTON, D.C. – American Ruler Elon Musk is poised to swing his machete of death upon Social Security, claiming that “vampires” may be collecting benefits, thus making many poor, elderly, bitter, dependent recipients of the program dance with glee.
Musk shared a chart on his “X” account late Sunday night, claiming that millions of folks over the age of 140 are listed in a Social Security database. Some over 200 years old. There are millions of Americans who collect social security (over 73 millions, the agency says) and that is all they have, period, to live on. But Musk may think the program is some kind of joke, making this childish comment as he shared his chart: “According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security (two laughing emojis).”
He did not, however, claim these persons are receiving benefits. This omission is allowing many MAGA worshippers to now share Musk’s chart and take liberty with the numbers. One Donald Trump disciple shared the chart and wrote, “Social Security is dishing out benefits to an astonishing **8,952,476** people claiming to be 110 and 199 years old. If each of these ‘super seniors’ is raking in just **$1,800 a month**, that’s a staggering **$193,373,481,600** annually.”
Many MAGA/Trump/Musk voters are already to the point of “finding out” what this administration means for their existence as a new reality in America is setting in. Will low-income Republican Social Security benefit-takers be the next to feel the pain, or will Musk merely root out any waste?
3 thoughts on “Elon Musk raises his machete to strike at Social Security, claims “vampires” may be collecting benefits”
Basically he is telling how many people died that were collecting Social Security. That Social Security number stays with the person and can never be given to another person.
No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits
Elon Musk claims to have found rampant fraud in the Social Security Administration. There’s a much simpler explanation.
Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project had uncovered massive government fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds were claiming Social Security benefits.
But Musk has provided no evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly pointed out that this is very likely just a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the government payment systems.
Musk first made the claims during his Oval Office press conference last week, when he claimed that a “cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records … So that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead.”
While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by the right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.
Larry “You are just a fear mongerer. My cult leader would never touch my Social Security. He loves me too much.”