Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his alleged project of the Ministry of Governmental efficiency (DOGE) had revealed huge government fraud when she claimed that children between the ages of 150 years were demanding social security benefits.
But Musk did not provide any evidence that supports his claims, and experts quickly indicated that this is very likely just a stadium of the coding language that belongs to contracts that support government payment systems.
Musk submitted the first claims during it The press conference of the Oval Office Last week, when he claimed that “a rapid social security examination, we got 150 years of age. Now, you know anyone is 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records … so this is a case I think She has died. “
While no guide was provided to support this claim, it was captured by right -wing commentators via the Internet, mainly on the X Musk platform, in addition to reporting it Reliable by Trump’s media outlets.
Soon the computer’s promoters claimed that the 150th number was not evidence of fraud, but rather as a result of a strange mixture of the social security management benefits system, which was largely written in Cobol, a 60 -year -old programming language that is subject to SSA databases as SSA as well as as well Systems from many other US government agencies.
Copol is rarely used today, and as such, musk cadre of young engineers may be unfamiliar with it.
Since Cobol has no kind of history, some applications instead depend on a system where all dates are Encrypted. The most common is May 20, 1875Because this was the history of an international conference set the standards held in Paris, known as the “Du Mètre Agreement”.
These virtual systems of the reference point when the date of birth is missing or incomplete, which means that all these entries in 2025 will appear ages 150.
This is just one potential explanation for what Dog was found. Musk could also have simply searched for SSA, which shows that since September 2015, the agency has stopped payment payments automatically When anyone reaches the age of 115.
However, Musk doubled on Monday morning, and published a screenshot of what he claims to be personalities from the “Social Security Database” to X, and he wrote that “the numbers of people in every bucket with the death field to a mistake!”
Figures indicate that more than 10 million people over the age of 120 years were collecting benefits.
“Purlasty may be real and there are many vampires who collect social security,” Musa wrote.
Musk database took a screenshot from a list of approximately 400 million people, which is more than five times the number of people receiving advantages in 2024, according to what he said SSA special site. It is also much more than the entire American population.
The fact that the social security system contains millions of entries from people who died is likely to be distinguished from a possible error in Cobol, and also not the news. A report written by SSA General Inspector in 2023 I found that 98 percent of the ages of 100 or more in social security databases do not receive any benefits. The report added that the database will not be updated because it will cost a lot of money to do so.