Are 150-year-old Americans receiving Social Security checks, as Elon Musk said?

In a closely watched Oval Office event, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk shared some of the findings and rationale behind his Department of Government Efficiency, which President Donald Trump has tasked with cutting spending across the government.

As an example of his work so far, Musk cited some "crazy things" that had emerged in just the "cursory examination of Social Security" his team was undertaking.

"We've got people in there that are 150 years old," Musk said Feb. 11. "Now, do you know anyone who's 150? I don't, OK. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. … I think they're probably dead, is my guess, or they should be very famous, one of the two."

The U.S. has roughly 100,000 centenarians, according to the Pew Research Center, but none is older than about 114 years old, and the oldest documented age for anyone in modern times was 122, according to the Guinness Book. 

When we checked with experts on Social Security, they offered two key points of context for Musk’s comment. 

• Government databases may code someone as 150 years old for reasons peculiar to the large and complex Social Security database.

• Improper payments are a longstanding concern for the agency, though they represent a small share of all payments.

The White House did not provide additional information on what Musk found.

Social media commenters came up with one possible explanation for the 150-year age, and experts who have worked closely with the Social Security Administration told PolitiFact it was plausible. 

Under an international standard called ISO 8601, a missing value for a date is coded as May 20, 1875, because that was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the "Convention du Mètre."

For that reason, under some coding systems, a missing value for a date will default to 1875 — which in the year 2025 produces a round figure of 150.

"Some people, particularly some immigrants, really don’t know their exact birthday, so there would have to be some alternative means of verification," said C. Eugene Steuerle, a fellow at the Urban Institute, a think tank, and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury Department during the Reagan administration.

Another possibility is that a beneficiary’s record in the system may have multiple fields for birth dates, one of which is missing data because it’s not needed for calculations. 

 "Some records may have missing codes, while others may have conflicting information on age or date of birth, so the staff would have created queries to determine which fields are actually used," J. Michael Collins, a University of Wisconsin professor of public affairs, said.

Beyond the question of whether 150-year-olds are receiving payments, Social Security does sometimes send out payments improperly.

The sheer scope of the agency’s payments — over $1 trillion a year — means that even a tiny fraction of mistakes adds up quickly.

Between fiscal years 2015 and 2022, which includes Trump’s first presidency, the Social Security Administration sent almost $71.8 billion in improper payments, according to a July 2024 agency inspector general report. The inspector general’s office called improper payments "a longstanding challenge."

A November 2021 inspector general’s report found $298 million in payments after death to some 24,000 beneficiaries. (About $84 million was returned, the report said.)

The Social Security Advisory Board, a group of outside experts, has regularly issued bipartisan recommendations to improve the agency’s accuracy record for payments, such as shifting death data collection to the Treasury Department. 

Collins said that incorrect birth dates or unnoticed deaths may not represent the biggest fraction of overpayments. Other reasons may be that the system has not caught up with life developments that prevent a former beneficiary from receiving payments, such as being incarcerated.

As a percentage of all payments, improper payments account for 0.84% of the total, the inspector general has found. 

That’s "better than any private insurance company in the nation," and with a lower cost of administration, said Henry J. Aaron, a fellow with the Brookings Institution think tank and a former chair of the Social Security Advisory Board.

As is often the case with complex systems, solving the last remaining fraction of technical problems can prove to be the most difficult. "The costs of having 0% error rate would actually be quite high, and would increase administrative costs," Collins said.

Adding to the challenge is that the Social Security Administration has had trouble securing funding and high-quality talent for years.

"If one is concerned about administration at Social Security — and there is cause for concern — it is because SSA staff has been cut for years, even as workloads have increased," Aaron said. "The backlog on disability insurance claims has grown."

The agency’s complicated databases need top-flight specialists to fix and upgrade, but the government pay scale isn’t high enough to attract the best the information technology sector has to offer,  Steuerle said

"For many years they weren’t even allowed to buy the best software," Steuerle said. "Outsiders are brought in for a price, but they generally aren’t personally committed for more than a short time."

Another challenge is a quirk in how the agency’s finances are structured. 

A dollar spent on fixing the improper payment problem could pay for itself with $10 in saved funds, said Jeffrey R. Brown, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois. For a private-sector company, those savings would be easy to see in the bottom line. Not so for Social Security.

To secure that first dollar to invest in technical fixes, the agency needs to lobby Congress, which is never easy and which could result in offsetting cuts to other parts of the agency. Then, if the agency does get that dollar and ends up saving $10 in payments, those proceeds would remain in the Social Security Trust Fund, which doesn’t help Congress’ own fiscal balance sheet, nor the agency’s own administrative budget.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.