Did Elon Musk say millions of people over 140 years old get Social Security benefits? No, that's not true: Musk did post a chart that he said was from the Social Security database, showing age categories up to 189 years old "with the death field set to FALSE!" and he jokingly added, "Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security." But he did not say "millions of people over 140 years old are receiving Social Security benefits," as was falsely attributed to him in a post made by someone else.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on February 17, 2025. It opened:
BREAKING: Elon Musk says millions of people over 140 years old are receiving Social Security benefits.
This is what the post looked like at the time of this writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Feb 17 15:42:21 2025 UTC)
The @unusual_whales post exaggerates what Musk posted.
The chart shows part of the Social Security database for Social Security Numbers (SSN) with no recorded death, according to Musk himself. In his post, he does not say they are all collecting benefits, but does joke there may be vampires in the system. Lead Stories found no publicly available evidence for the @unusual_whales claim that "millions of people over 140" are collecting Social Security.
Musk did not discover this problem.
A 2023 audit (archived here) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) states that a 2015 report determined that correcting the data wasn't worth the cost and more measures aimed at preventing "improper payments" were implemented since, through its "Do Not Pay" and "Earnings After Death" initiatives. Those initiatives were put forward after the SSA deemed that presuming "would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals' personal information in the [Death Master File]." The Social Security Administration's death master file is used by state agencies for a variety of purposes, so declaring someone dead has a variety of consequences unrelated to Social Security.
The same 2023 report found 44,000 individuals born in 1920 or earlier who didn't have any death data on file still receiving Social Security benefits. In 2024, the Pew Research Center found approximately 101,000 centenarians in the U.S.
Lead Stories contacted the SSA for comment and will update this fact check as appropriate when they reply.
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Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning Elon Musk can be found here.
