Elon Musk Raises Alarm Over Social Security

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has taken issue with payments made by the Social Security Administration (SSA) as his spending task force investigates the government agency.

Why It Matters

Social Security benefits are paid to tens of millions of Americans every month, and help form the bedrock of income for many retirees, survivors of deceased claimants and disabled people.

Musk, who was selected by President Donald Trump to head the non-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been tasked with streamlining government processes and cutting spending.

What To Know

Posting on X, formerly Twitter, Musk presented a spreadsheet of data showing "the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!"

It includes 46 million between the ages of 60 and 69, the period during which a person becomes eligible to collect retirement benefits. It also includes more than ten million listed as being above the age of 100, including one who is recorded as being between the ages of 360 to 369 years of age.

"Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," Musk wrote.

Newsweek has been unable to verify the data Musk has presented. The total of the numbers included add up to considerably more than the number of beneficiaries that are paid by the Social Security Administration (SSA) every month, which was around 73 million as of January this year. It is also higher than the total U.S. population, which is around 341 million at the time of the last census in 2020.

Newsweek has contacted the SSA for comment via email outside of regular working hours.

This is not the first time Musk has taken issue with spending at the SSA, which has among the largest annual expenditures in the U.S. government budget.

"If money is spent badly, if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible and frugal manner, then that's not okay. Your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on the things that matter to the people," Musk said speaking from the White House last week alongside President Trump. "It's just common sense. It's not draconian or radical. I think it's really just saying let's look at each of the expenditures and say, is this actually in the best interest of the people, and if it is, it's approved, if it's not, we should think about it."

He added: "There's crazy things, like, 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."

What People Are Saying

Musk wrote on X on February 11: "At this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you've ever heard by FAR. It's not even close."

Bob Westbrooks, a former inspector general for the federal government during the Obama and first Trump administrations, told CNBC: "Waste is in the eye of the beholder—that's a political issue. We're conflating the difference between waste and fraud, I think, in an irresponsible and reckless way. It's causing agencies to be shut down. It's causing people to lose their jobs."

Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told Newsweek last week: "Social Security beneficiaries and their families have every reason to be alarmed by Elon Musk's takeover of the U.S. Department of Treasury's payment system, which is responsible for paying Social Security benefits.

"Seniors, their families, and people with disabilities most certainly cannot trust Trump and Musk with their crucial federal benefits, or their personal data.  We hope that the courts will halt this effort to hijack the Treasury Department's payment system for blatantly political purposes."

What's Next

Exactly what Musk and his DOGE team plan to do with the SSA and its spending is unclear at this time. However, several other government agencies have been asked to reduce workforces in recent days.