Tech billionaire Elon Musk has revealed data from the Social Security Administration that he referred to as “vampires collecting Social Security.”
In a post on X, Musk shared a screenshot of a data sheet showing people from age 0 to 369 years old collecting Social Security benefits.
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!” he said in an X post on Sunday.
According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security ???????? pic.twitter.com/ltb06VX98Z
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he added.
Musk was referring to Twilight, a popular teenage vampire drama starring Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.
“Edward Cullen is collecting for sure,” an X user quipped about the fictional vampire.
“It’s not like he has a job!” Musk responded.
“Maybe we pause payments to everyone 120+ until they can authenticate they’re among the living, to start,” Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) said.
Musk’s post prompted X users to crunch the numbers.
“394,943,364 but total population is 334M?” Australian businessman Aiden Hiko posted on X.
“Yes, there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” Musk responded, adding, “This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Some tech experts jumped in to criticize Musk’s data gathering.
“This just demonstrates how Elon Musk does not understand how the SQL is updropped in the COBOL,” database engineer Joscha Bach posted. “He has no idea how many specially trained engineers are needed for the data integrity. Social security servers will be fatal crash in two weeks from now.”
The COBOL, or common business-oriented language, system that Bach is referring to is a decades-old computer programming language used in most federal government systems.
Fast Company journalist Mark Sullivan wrote that there are some concerns that “Musk’s young engineers might blunder into the COBOL code base and make changes without understanding the full effects.”
“Normally, any changes to the code underlying government systems has to follow a set of detailed business requirements written by other agency staffers,” Sullivan wrote. “Any delays or downtime in these systems has direct effects on real people’s lives.”
Musk has openly criticized the computer systems as being out-of-date.
“The government is literally still running COBOL code that was written before DOS 1.0,” he said on X last week.
X users mocked the slew of “COBOL experts” attacking Musk’s data, shooting back: “He has database engineers working under him who are 100x more expert than you. I don’t think he needs your so-called expertise.”
Elon Musk posting facts about Social Security and all of a sudden, all resistance are COBOL experts. Ok lol pic.twitter.com/qcLsYGmNH0
— TegridyBanks (@TegridyBanks) February 17, 2025
Justin Wolfers, an expert on databases and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, chimed on on Musk’s Social Security spreadsheet.
“One thing I’ve learned to do when I have questions about social security number holders who are age 100 or older is to look up the SSA Inspector General audit report, ‘Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident,'” Wolfers posted.
Wolfers insists that 98% of “the numberholders” have received no payments.
“Why are there dead people on (this one table of) the social security database? They died before the use of electronic death records,” he said.
“Should government databases be cleaner? It’s a cost-benefit question,” he said. “Cost: $5-10m to clean out the old records. Benefit: Only ‘limited benefit’ because ‘almost none’ of these records are receiving payments. This hardly feels like big potatoes, either way.”
Several X users took issue with Wolfers’s data analysis.
“Seems that if the SS computers can’t do a simple count of how many people have social security numbers in the system, and what their ages are, Elon is correct,” an X user reacted. “It’s time to stop using computers from 1980 and put in some new ones that don’t require ‘Many specially trained engineers’ to run them.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Last week at the White House, Musk previewed his findings by saying, “Just a cursory examination of Social Security and we’ve got people in there that are about 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t. OK. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re missing out.”
According to the Guinness Book, the oldest person ever documented was 122.