WASHINGTON – Elon Musk suggests he has obtained access to the personal financial records of federal employees, but the White House will not say how or why.

Musk, the world’s richest person and now a top aide to President Donald Trump, alluded to this data during an Oval Office appearance with Trump Tuesday evening as he took questions from reporters.

“We do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have, ostensibly, a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth,” he said.

In reality, only 3% of the 2.4 million federal employees make more than $200,000 a year, while half make between $50,000 and $110,000 a year, according to government figures. Further, workers who have made six figures for a number of years could easily be worth seven figures, particularly those in their 50s or 60s who have been saving for retirement for decades and have considerable equity in their homes.

But Musk’s assertion raises the more fundamental question about how he would know the financial situations of federal employees.

“How on earth would he have the information about the net worths of government employees?” asked Norm Eisen, a top White House ethics lawyer under President Barack Obama. “Either he’s making it up, which is profoundly concerning for the most powerful government official in history, or he has gotten access to data that he has no business getting.”

White House aides failed to respond to multiple HuffPost queries on the matter.

The federal government has ready access to its own payroll data and knows precisely how much it pays federal employees. But it is unclear how it would know about the total financial holdings and debts of its employees, apart from the relative few who are required to file annual financial disclosures.

The White House, meanwhile, is refusing to make public Musk’s own financial disclosure form and any related ethics waivers he received because of his multi-billion contracts with the Pentagon and NASA for launch services.

When HuffPost asked Trump why the White House was not making Musk’s form public during a mid-flight news conference Sunday, Trump lied. “It is public,” he said. “All you have to do is read it.”

High-ranking government employees are generally required to submit financial disclosure forms that are then made available to the public on the Office of Government Ethics’ website. This week, Trump fired the head of that office.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump and Musk would work together to make sure Musk abides by ethics laws. “We feel very confident with the ethics and the guardrails that have been put in place here,” she said.

Musk, who like Trump is prone to spreading falsehoods and wild conspiracy theories on social media, accused some federal employees of abusing their positions to get richer in his Oval Office appearance.

“I think the reality is that they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer expense. That’s the honest truth of it,” he said, without providing any evidence.

On Tuesday, he was posting similar claims about lawmakers and their worths, using a list he found with erroneous numbers. “It’s not like these politicians started companies or were NBA All-Stars, so where did they get all the money?” he wrote. “Does anyone know?”