Elon Musk revealed on Tuesday that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency found some supposed 150-year-olds on the Social Security rolls.
The multibillionaire entrepreneur and leader of the government reform project said in remarks to the media in the Oval Office alongside President Donald Trump that his team is discovering some “crazy things” as they open Uncle Sam’s books.
“Just a cursory examination of Social Security and we’ve got people in there that are about 150 years old,” Musk told reporters.
“Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t,” he continued. “They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re missing out.”
“So, you know, that’s the case where, like, I think they’re probably dead is my guess, or they should be very famous. One of the two,” he added.
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If one consults the Guinness Book of World Records, one learns that the oldest person to ever live, at least in modern history, was 122-year-old Jeanne Calment, a French woman born in 1875 who died in 1997.
With Trump and Musk leading, can Social Security be saved?
Yes: 100% (9 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
Sarah Knauss, an American, was 119 when she died in 1999.
There are several other people born in the late nineteenth century who managed to see the end of the twentieth or the start of the twenty-first.
If we revert to the Iron Age, we see some even older people.
Jehoiada, a priest in the kingdom of Judah during the reign of Ahaziah and Joash, died at 130.
In the earliest centuries of mankind, we of course have Methuselah, who the book of Genesis tells us lived to be 969, according to the ministry Answers in Genesis.
Other honorable mentions include Noah, who lived to 950, and our first father Adam himself, who lived to 930.
Beyond the possible yet unlikely scenario of Neo-Methuselah roaming the plains of Kansas or the hills of Tennessee on the dime of Social Security, the answer may lie in old-fashioned fraud.
Between 2018 and 2022, the federal government lost between $233 billion and $521 billion every single year due to fraud, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Despite how much the media hates the DOGE effort, Musk told them that handling waste, fraud, and abuse is a matter of simple prudence.
“If money is spent badly, if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible and frugal manner, then that’s not okay,” he said.
“Your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on the things that matter to the people.”
Musk repeated that “it’s just common sense.”
“It’s not draconian or radical,” he continued. “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.”
Unfortunately for Musk, the media certainly lacks such “common sense.”
But the people are certainly in agreement that we should not be sending checks every month to long-dead people or corrupt actors fraudulently claiming their identities.
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