theodp writes: Fox News and other major news outlets reported that Elon Musk, who has been tasked with leading DOGE as a special government employee, spoke to reporters on Tuesday from the Oval Office of the White House with President Donald Trump and said DOGE found payments going to beneficiaries listed as being around the age of 150, though he didn’t go into detail about the claims.
“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,” Musk said. “Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re missing out. So, 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.
While BBC fact-checkers and the New York Times reported they could neither confirm nor deny Musk’s claims, others on the web aren’t buying Musk’s story. Daily Kos contributor Lobachevsky offers this possible explanation for the ‘crazy things’ Musk credited his team for uncovering: “Reports say that his group at DOGE is made up of fairly young people. What those kids don’t realize is that Social Security uses VERY OLD computers. They’re programmed with an old version of the programming language COBOL. A bit of history. On May 20, 1875 a bunch of countries got together to create the International Bureau of Weight and Measures which established uniform standards of mass and length. Later on, the Bureau established rules for dates as well. The dates standard used a starting date of May 20 1875 to honor the creation of the Bureau. Old versions of COBOL use that date as a baseline. Social Security’s computers use that old version. Dates are stored as the number of days AFTER May 20 1875. So what happens if Social Security doesn’t know a birthdate? That field is empty in its records. Thus that person appears to have a birthday of May 20 1875-about 150 years ago. That’s why the crack team of youngsters Musk uses found 150-year-old people in Social Security getting benefits. It’s all really as simple—and as stupid—as that.”
There are undoubtedly big fraud problems to solve at Social Security, just as there are at Musk-founded PayPal and other companies. But does Social Security truly have a material problem with paying people who are “about 150 years old,” or is the problem here more one of misinformed sensationalism? And could Musk’s DOGE team use a crash course in COBOL and other data representation arcana?
