Musk claims 1.5 million US pensioners over age 150

Musk’s claim about pensioners over 150 years old

Elon Musk has circulated a table suggesting that more than 1.5 million individuals listed as over 150 years old appear in the US Social Security database with their death status marked as false. Musk joked, “Maybe Twilight is real and there are lots of vampires collecting pensions.” However, the figure remains unverified, and the BBC could not find specific evidence supporting the claim. Some argue these records do not necessarily correspond to living persons and that the table may be misinterpreted.

The data spread rapidly, reopening debate on the viability of the public pension system. It is not just an accounting issue: if these ghost beneficiaries are being paid, someone is funding them. And if they vote, the electoral map shifts.

How many ghost pensioners are there in the United States?

The table shared by Musk shows impossible age ranges: not only 1.5 million over 150, but hundreds of thousands between 110 and 129, and some cases approaching 370. The most common technical explanation points to a failure in the COBOL system, the programming language underpinning much of US administrative infrastructure. Its epoch date is January 1, 1601, and a date field error can turn any deceased person into a supercentenarian.

However, this hypothesis does not explain why the death field remains marked as false. If the system had only a formatting issue, records would show absurd dates but correctly processed deaths. That is not the case.

Fraud calculation: €9 billion per year

Using round numbers, a conservative estimate assumes half a million of these beneficiaries receive an average of €1,500 per month in twelve payments. A quick calculation yields €9 billion annually. The actual figure could be higher if survivor pensions still received by relatives of the deceased are included, a type of fraud seen in Spain: one woman collected her mother’s pension for over twenty years by forging proof of life, until she was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to repay the stolen funds monthly.

The parallel with Spain is not coincidental. Applying a simple rule of three, if the US has 300 million inhabitants and 1.5 million ghost pensioners, Spain, with 47 million, would have around 235,000 retirees born when Cuba was still Spanish. No one has audited this figure, but skepticism toward official records is already established.

Mail-in voting and the ghost army of voters

The political fallout was immediate. Part of the analysis argues that inflated records serve to pad the voter roll, with mail-in voting as the vehicle to mobilize them. The suspicion is not new: in Spain, cases have been detected of voter ID cards sent to addresses with unknown names, a phenomenon some attribute to administrative errors and others to deliberate strategy.

The link between ghost pensions and electoral fraud is unproven. But the coincidence that states with the highest detected fraud also concentrate the tightest electoral battles fuels all kinds of theories. Musk’s audit, according to its promoters, could alter the outcome of upcoming legislative elections if the voter roll is cleaned up.

COBOL, the language holding the system together

The episode has highlighted a technology few outside the sector know. COBOL, created in 1959, still manages banks, railway systems, space agencies, and Social Security itself. The few programmers who master it command high salaries and are a bottleneck for modernization. The paradox is that the 150-year-old fraud is not due to a COBOL error, but to decades of database neglect.

Musk’s audit has at least brought to light a problem successive governments ignored. It remains to be seen whether record cleanup will occur or if, as so often before, the scandal fades into oblivion. If the data is true, the US pension system has a hole that no reform can plug without first cleaning the beneficiary list.