“Elon Musk found people in the Social Security system as old as 360 years of age.”

Address to a joint session of Congress (echoing Musk's X post)

Nobody aged 360, or anywhere close, is collecting Social Security. The Social Security Administration's own Inspector General found that "almost none" of the implausibly old numberholders in the database receive any payments: 98 percent of numberholders aged 100 or older were not receiving benefits at all.

The absurd ages are database artifacts, not fraud. SSA's decades-old COBOL-based system lacks a standard date type, so records with missing or incomplete birth dates can default to reference points more than 150 years in the past. These are stale entries for people whose deaths were never recorded, not checks going out to 360-year-olds. The SSA Inspector General documented this years before Musk's chart, and the agency had already decided fixing every old record wasn't worth the cost.

Actual improper payments are a rounding error, not 'massive fraud.' Per a July 2024 Inspector General report, from fiscal years 2015 through 2022 SSA paid out almost $8.6 trillion in benefits, of which $71.8 billion (less than 1 percent) was improper, and most of that was overpayments to living beneficiaries, not payments to the dead. Real-world data shows only about 89,000 people aged 99 or older receive Social Security payments. "Almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments." — Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General, July 2023 report (cited by FactCheck.org)