Opinion | How Elon Musk’s willful ignorance serves his political ends – The Washington Post

Opinion
Philip Bump

The tactical ignorance of Elon Musk

Musk’s claims of widespread fraud in the Social Security system merit skepticism.
February 19, 2025 at 7:30 a.m. EST, Today at 7:30 a.m. EST, 7 min

With President Donald Trump sitting quietly to his left in the Oval Office last week, Elon Musk offered White House reporters an example of the sort of fraud that is the ostensible target of his arm of the administration.

After a “cursory examination of Social Security,” he said, “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150?” This, he added, was “a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. That’s my guess. Or should be very famous. One of the two.”

Musk, you will recall, is a tech guy. And it didn’t take long for other tech guys to point out a probable explanation for those 150-year-olds, one that Musk should probably have considered: It was what a data error in an old system often looks like — a function of date values being left blank in a database or outdated records or both.

But Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.

Source Links: Opinion | How Elon Musk’s willful ignorance serves his political ends – The Washington Post