Musk's claims of Social Security payouts to dead people lack evidence

"According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," Musk said in a February 16, 2025 post on X.

The post includes a chart divided by age brackets that counts nearly 400 million people, including more than 20 million listed between the ages of 100 and 369.

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Screenshot from X taken February 19, 2025

"This might be the biggest fraud in history," Musk, tasked by President Donald Trump with cutting government expenditure, said in a follow-up post.

Trump recited the numbers from Musk's post during a February 19 investment conference in Florida, noting his administration was "finding tremendous abuse, waste and fraud in Social Security."

"The record topper, there is one person on Social Security who is 360 years old," Trump said, to laughter and cheers.

The claims come amid turmoil at the Social Security Administration (SSA), where acting commissioner Michelle King resigned, reportedly after a clash with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency about access to the agency's troves of sensitive data.

Days earlier, Musk suggested in the Oval Office that 150-year-olds were taking in Social Security benefits, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News that they suspected there are "tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments."

But Musk's suggestion is not supported by evidence.

"It is absolutely inaccurate," Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor of public policy and labor economics, told AFP (archived here). "In fact, we know the true number."

The table Musk posted lists people he suggested are "collecting Social Security." 

But official data on the SSA's website shows that fewer than 68.5 million people were receiving retirement, survivor or disability benefits at the end of 2024 (archived here). Among retired workers age 99 and up, 89,106 were collecting payments (archived here).

The US population is projected at about 341 million, and an estimated 101,000 Americans were living as centenarians in 2024, according to the US Census Bureau and the Pew Research Center (archived here and here). The oldest person in history is believed to have lived to 122 years old.

Since September 2015, the SSA has automatically stopped payments to people who are 115 or older, according to its website (archived here).

Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation, said Musk's numbers do not match the known costs of Social Security, either (archived here).

"If this table were accurate, Social Security would cost $1 trillion per year more than it actually does," Walczak said on X (archived here).

Musk's numbers

Although Musk did not specify a source for the figures he posted, Wolfers and other experts told AFP they appear to come from the Numident, an internal database of Social Security card holders.

Social Security numbers are usually given to Americans shortly after birth and may also be issued to new immigrants, visiting workers and others.

"The most likely explanation is that he is looking at the number of Social Security numbers, not the number of beneficiaries," University of Illinois professor Jeffrey Brown, who served on the Social Security Advisory Board under former Republican president George W. Bush, told AFP (archived here).

Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who was the SSA's principal deputy commissioner under Bush, agreed (archived here).

"Musk confused the existence of a Social Security number with benefits being paid on that number," Biggs told AFP. "They're not the same."

A 2023 audit from the SSA inspector general found that as of December 2020, the Numident was missing death information for some 18.9 million Social Security numbers corresponding to people born in 1920 or earlier (archived here). In other words, those people were marked as 100 or older and alive.

The inspector general concluded that most of those 18.9 million holders were dead, however. Just 44,000 -- which the report described as "almost none" of them -- were receiving benefits.

"Benefits were paid only on 44,000," Biggs said. "That's a perfectly reasonable number, given the population of Americans of that age."

Lee Dudek, whom Trump appointed as the SSA's acting commissioner, disputed the claims about millions of claimants being aged over 100 in a February 19 statement (archived here).

"I also want to acknowledge recent reporting about the number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security," Dudek said. "The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits."

The inspector general's 2023 report said the missing records are likely because many Americans died before the use of electronic death notifications.

Improving the process of confirming deaths would require additional funding to an agency already strapped for cash, Biggs said.

"There is little evidence that Social Security benefits are being fraudulently paid out to any of these very old Social Security numbers," he told AFP. "And so the Social Security Administration may not see it as a high priority for limited funds."

Brown added that mistakes made when manually entering data could also produce errors, but he has "yet to see compelling evidence that there are a large number of people receiving benefits after death."

Alex Nowrasteh, vice president of economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said on X that undocumented immigrants who pay into Social Security -- and are not eligible to receive the program's benefits -- could also account for some of the older Social Security numbers (archived here and here).

Fraud is real, but less common

While Musk's numbers exaggerate the issue, the SSA has documented problems with erroneous payments, including to dead people.

Asked about Musk's claims, the White House's Leavitt told AFP: "A previous investigation revealed the SSA paid at least $71.8 BILLION in improper payments."

The press secretary was referring to a July 2024 report from the SSA's inspector general, which found that the agency made $71.8 billion in improper payments -- mainly overpayments -- between the 2015 and 2022 fiscal years, a timeframe that includes Trump's first presidency (archived here).

The report said this represented 0.84 percent of the nearly $8.6 trillion disbursed in that window, and that some overpaid funds were recovered.

Another report from 2021 estimated that the SSA issued $298 million in benefits to about 24,000 people who had already died -- and recovered approximately $84 million (archived here). The report blamed the misdirected payments on protocol problems and said the watchdog did not identify specific instances of fraud.

Separately, the US Treasury announced in January 2025 that it recouped over $31 million in federal payments to dead people as part of a five-month pilot program granting the Treasury access to SSA data (archived here).

Brown told AFP that any Social Security fraud and waste that is happening "is tiny in comparison to the size of the program." 

"Even if we could wave a magic wand and eliminate all waste, fraud and abuse tomorrow, if would be a tiny drop in the very large bucket of financial challenges facing the program."

Martin O'Malley, the SSA commissioner under former Democratic president Joe Biden, said in an interview with NewsNation that "the real fraud" happens when people hijack others' benefits, adding that staffing and funding issues present a bigger problem (archived here).

On Musk, O'Malley said: "He doesn't know what he's talking about."

AFP has debunked other misinformation about US politics here.