Musk’s shocking case, however, was long known to the Social Security Administration (SSA) watchdog, which released an audit in July 2023 that found that 18.9 million people listed as 100 or older — but not dead — were in its database.
Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, only 86,000 people living in the United States at the time actually lived to be centenarians. About 44,000 were actually receiving benefits, including 13 people over the age of 112.
About 18.4 million people were found in the 2023 audit to have not received benefits or reported income for 50 years, meaning they were likely dead.
Screenshot of a social media post X about the number of people receiving Social Security benefits in the US.
However, audits have revealed that there are about 531 million Social Security numbers in circulation in the U.S. (a country of just over 341 million people) — and “thousands” of them may be being used to commit identity fraud.
A 2015 audit found that about $3.1 billion in income was reported by employers or self-employed individuals who did not actually hold Social Security numbers.
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president of the Cato Institute for economic and social policy research, responded to Musk’s tweet by noting that many of the Social Security numbers of people over 100 are “illegal immigrants paying in, not fraudulent recipients withdrawing money.”
“By all means, clean up the SSA and mark those people as dead,” Nowrasteh said. “Maybe that’s OK, SS should be shut down anyway, but there’s a downside.”
Payments to deceased beneficiaries also happen at other federal agencies. Under former President Joe Biden, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a government agency, overpaid $127 million to the Teamsters pension fund for nearly 3,500 deceased members—before reaching a settlement with the Justice Department to return the money.
