The Fraud That Wasn't

the nexus of irresponsible tweeting, bad data, and wishful thinking

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Comments are now turned off — apologies to my paid subs; I am very busy at work.

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There is a substantial bit of new information at the very bottom of this post, provided by a Social Security employee.

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Thinking critically about my own thinking is one of the most valuable—and most difficult—skills my therapist has taught me.

With his help, I’ve learned to interrogate my conclusions, especially when those conclusions do one of two things: make me feel better about myself—superior to someone else—in the immediate moment or give me a reason to be angry.

Interrogating my conclusions, especially when I catch myself in one of those two emotional states, has saved me from countless mistakes.

Failing to interrogate my conclusions has led to making countless mistakes.

These lessons have been brutally difficult. I struggle with self-loathing and depression—anger turned inward, the rare self-help cliché that’s actually true—and I often grasp at anything that lets me feel something different.

But it’s invaluable. And it’s the main reason, not my mathematical prowess, that I didn’t fall for the nonsense almost everyone on the center-right and right did this week.

This heuristic—“If something makes me angry, especially in a way that fuels a sense of superiority, I should assume something important is hiding in my blind spots and find it before doing anything else”—is a lifesaver.

It works just like “If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is” does against financial scams.

Now, let’s address a simple fact: there were never over ten million fraudulent Social Security recipients.

More importantly, we need to face what it means that so many people believe this: It’s no longer just the left demanding blind loyalty over reality; it’s also conservatives accepting non-real claims that flatter their biases.

If we keep letting tribal loyalty trump truth, the coming hell will make us nostalgic for the “they/them” pronoun debates of 2022.

Brace yourself: truth bomb incoming.

For those of you who are already angry: if you’re reading this on the web, you can cancel your subscription by clicking your profile picture in the upper right and selecting “Manage Subscription.” If you’re reading it in email, clicking on the title should open a browser that takes you to the web version.

Musk’s Monday Morning Tweet

I am going to try to be fair to Elon Musk in this post. Fair. Not charitable. He is presently wielding an astonishing amount of power that is causing ripple effects into hundreds of millions of lives. I will not treat him like a child.

Late Sunday night/early Monday morning, depending on your time zone, Elon Musk tweeted this:

It’s important to note a few things about this tweet.

Saying that maybe there are “vampires collecting Social Security” clearly implies that this is a count of beneficiaries, at least with regard to the people in the older buckets.

If that wasn’t his intention — a possibility I will address below — then he had ample opportunity to correct it when this tweet exploded and almost everyone interpreted it that way.

He did precisely the opposite, positing that it may be the biggest fraud in history.

President Trump parroted Musk:

Twitter is full of people doing math and coming up with absurd conclusions, like that fully a third of Social Security’s budget is fraud, or that the government is somehow spending almost $200,000,000,000 a year sending money to dead people.

Conservative influencers are both commenting and memeing:

And Musk continues to respond to them as if he believes that the fraud is as widespread as his initial “might be the biggest in history” claim.

The multiple attempts by sensible people to reason this out sanely get a lot less traction than the outrage tweets felt by those who are drunk on the sweet, sweet dopamine of self-righteous fury. Note the 146,000 views compared to the original tweet — which has a view count north of 90,000,000 as I write this.

Why the Right Fell For It

Before diving into why these fraud-on-a-galactic-scale claims are nonsense, I want to address why the right fell for them.

Three factors, in varying degrees, explain why so many on the right and center-right fell for this.

1. The emotions that my therapist has taught me to use as a clue that something very important might be standing in the center of my blind spot, superiority and anger, and especially the combination of the two: superiority-fueled rage. This narrative instantly triggered self-righteous fury on the center-right and right. All along, the goddamn Democrats had been bankrupting the country—$200 billion a year in payments to dead people! They knew it! They always knew why taxes were so high and government so bloated! And now, a month into our side’s greatest comeback, we’re fixing it!

2. The center-right and right have been treated so shabbily by institutions and elites that when someone with power and influence says something they believe—or want to believe—the dopamine rush is staggering. There’s a reason grown-ass adults attend rallies for a politician, something that ought to be embarrassing. Trump making average Americans feel welcome and seen in their own effing country, finally, is not unlike a neglected child seizing a rare scrap of parental approval. This is why Trump, a thrice-married serial adulterer and hedonist, the antithesis of traditional values, commands such rabid devotion on the right: he makes them feel seen, heard, welcomed, and respected.

3. The idea that Woke functions like a religion is both common and obvious. Woke is the dominant faith on the left. Most on the right already have a religion—and don’t need another. But it also means the right has the mental framework to follow a leader—especially one who makes them feel important, valued, and cared for. This isn’t a criticism. I’ve often written about how much I wish I could believe in God. I’m simply noting that many on the right are primed to follow a leader with complete trust—and far too much benefit of the doubt. They’re vulnerable to this, just as someone with a serious trauma history (like the MathNerd in my mirror) is vulnerable to self-sabotaging via rationalizing, not taking risks she should take.

Trump sits squarely at the intersection of these three forces. Musk, in turn, inherits Trump’s goodwill—along with the entirely deserved gratitude he earned for buying Twitter and ensuring at least one place online remains where saying “Men aren’t women” won’t get you banned.

If you see yourself in these patterns and feel insulted, I hope you’ll still let yourself think about it. If you’re on the right or center-right and don’t see yourself in this, good for you—this section wasn’t about you.

Using Our Brains: How to Know It’s Bullshit

Start with your own direct experience.

Between my own grandparents, the parents and grandparents of friends, and the unusually high number of losses I’ve experienced, I know firsthand what happens after at least fourteen Social Security recipients die. In every case, Social Security took the money back. Some families mistakenly believed that if their loved one lived past a certain day of the month, they’d receive the full month’s benefits—and counted on that money for final expenses. Tough luck.

Funeral homes notify Social Security of deaths. One of my friends turns to me for almost everything, as she trusts me more than anyone. (Bless her heart.) When her father died, she texted me in a panic. The funeral director wanted his Social Security number. She feared a scam or identity theft. I reassured her it was standard procedure, meant to save her the trouble of notifying Social Security herself.

What’s your experience? Have you ever had to call Social Security and beg them to stop sending checks to a deceased family member? Has a friend ever mentioned this happening? Or is Social Security’s speed in reclaiming payments just common knowledge?

Now, think about what it would take for these claims to be true.

The Social Security Administration has published recipient data by age for as long as online records exist. Here is the 2022 report. See how much more reasonable the numbers are than what Musk tweeted?

For these claims to be true, the government would have to be staffed by people willing to falsify these records every year—across multiple administrations, including Trump’s and other Republicans in recent decades. How? Were new hires pulled aside and told to fake reports—with none of them balking at the risk of jail? Did new hires all get cut in? Were they told, “you’ll get your share of the $200,000,000,000 in fraudulent money but you have to keep coming to work, sssshhhh!”

Maybe you believe that some of those supposed ten million fraudsters work at Social Security just to fake these reports.

Ten million people. That’s more than the entire population of Michigan. It’s more than Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, and West Virginia—combined. Imagine every single person in those states, from newborns to retirees, all somehow collecting fraudulent Social Security checks—and no one noticing.

Every one of these people would have to maintain the fiction that an impossibly old relative, someone born before World War I, in many cases, was still alive and living with them.

The Glaringly Obvious

If the legitimate work DOGE has done has taught us anything, it’s that scamming the U.S. government doesn’t require a fake centenarian living in your house!

It’s far easier—and perfectly legal—to start an NGO lobbying for transgender opera in Ecuador. No prison risk, no dead relatives required. And if you took that route, you’d get far more than the $1,900 average Social Security check, without having to pretend Great-Grandpa is still cashing his.

As Jared Walczak pointed out in his criminally overlooked tweet (screenshot above), this would mean over a TRILLION extra dollars in spending every year.

Let’s break that down:
A trillion is 1,000 billion.
A billion is 1,000 million.
A million is 1,000 thousand.

Think about that. It begs a serious question.

How stupid do you think President Trump is, exactly?

Do you really believe Trump spent four years in office, missed a trillion dollars a year in fraud, and just nodded along to fake reports?

What’s Actually Going On?

Friends, I have distressing news for you.

The digital world runs on data, and most databases are a mess. The government is not especially bad at database maintenance. For a dataset as big as Social Security’s, the amount of cleaning needed implied by the numbers in Musk’s tweet is about average. Not great, by any means, but also not terrible.

The very first thing a data scientist—hi, that’s me!—does with a new dataset is to clean it. That means digging through mountains of garbage data: duplicate records, entries that contradict each other, absurd outliers, timestamps that claim transactions happened in the year 1783, missing values where critical information should be, and fields that were obviously populated by someone smashing their keyboard in frustration.

So, what does this look like in practice?

Take one of my old projects: I was analyzing call center data when I found something bizarre—the average call-taker had handled about -181 calls in a day.

What would you think if you saw that?

If your first thought is, “Okay, that’s weird. Something’s wrong,” or at least, “I must not understand this. I should check with whoever gave me the data,” then congratulations. You are officially more competent and responsible than Elon Musk.

In reality, someone had mistakenly logged a call-taker’s total as -2000, dragging the entire average into nonsense territory.

The fix? Delete that call-taker from the dataset for that day. The only reasonable move—though, of course, I kept a careful record, as any good data scientist would.

What Elon Musk did—tweeting out raw, unverified data and calling it “maybe the biggest fraud in history”—is the equivalent of a CEO spotting an average of -181 calls per day, concluding that employees are hanging up on 181 customers daily, and somehow missing the fact that, by his own logic, zero customers are getting served at all—without ever noticing a problem. Then, instead of questioning the data, he panics and launches a furious company-wide crackdown to fix the nonexistent crisis.

Yes. It’s that egregious.

Why the Database Is A Mess

Why are there more Social Security numbers with the death flag set to False than there are Americans?

Sloppy database practices are the main culprit—but cleaning up a system that spans all 50 states, decades of incompatible computer systems, and thousands of government users is far more complicated than you probably think.

A 2021 audit on overpayments found $214 million in unrecovered payments to dead recipients—total, not per year. That’s bad. Obviously, it needs fixing.

But does it justify scrapping and rebuilding the entire system? That’s not a simple question. Social Security’s systems can’t afford a single day of downtime. Too many Americans rely on it. Upgrading the database without disrupting benefits would require redundant systems running in parallel, rigorous testing, and gradual transitions—all while ensuring payments go out on time, every time.

Even major private-sector companies botch system overhauls, but Social Security doesn’t get that luxury. A single error could mean millions of seniors missing their checks.

It’s already well-documented that many extremely old birthdates remain in the system without death updates. It’s been studied — the report is here — and the conclusion, while debatable, is not unreasonable: that fixing it would be extremely costly with little benefit, since these people aren’t receiving payments anyway.

But that’s not the only reason for more Social Security numbers than living Americans.

Temporary workers receive Social Security numbers. People can be assigned a new number after identity theft—not that that’s a widespread problem, right?— witness protection, or escaping domestic violence.

Bottom line: with over 340 million Americans, each with a Social Security number, it doesn’t take a conspiracy to create a messy database.

But what else is driving these ancient, impossible birthdates?

COBOL, the programming language still running a significant portion of government and financial systems, handles dates in a way that practically invites chaos in modern datasets. Many COBOL systems store dates as six-digit YYMMDD or MMDDYY values, meaning that during the Year 2000 transition, programmers had to scramble to avoid confusing 1901 with 2001. Some systems implemented windowing tricks—treating any two-digit year above a certain threshold as 19XX and anything below as 20XX—while others never got updated at all. Worse, some COBOL systems store dates as packed decimal fields or even plain text, meaning leading zeros might disappear or dates could be misaligned entirely. If you’ve ever seen a file where a date is mysteriously 123199 instead of 19991231, or where 1970 suddenly shows up as 70, 0070, or even blank, that’s COBOL’s legacy at work. Now imagine trying to merge that with databases using ISO 8601 formats, Unix timestamps, or even Excel’s bizarre 1900-based system.

It’s a miracle anything lines up at all.

One major culprit for these absurd ages is the default value problem. When a date field is missing or corrupted, some COBOL systems auto-fill it with a placeholder like 010101 (January 1, 1901) or even 000000, which then converts to the earliest or latest possible year in the system’s range, sometimes landing in the 1700s or 2200s.

Now imagine these errors cascading through decades of database migrations, patchwork fixes, and cross-system integrations. A single COBOL-era date error can survive multiple modernizations, get misinterpreted at each step, and eventually land in a dataset as a “251-year-old Social Security recipient”.

Musk’s Defenders and Excuse Makers

Depressingly, Twitter is flooded with people blindly defending Musk. They’re absolutely convinced he must be right. Why? Because he’s so smart! Because surely he wouldn’t recklessly tweet something this inflammatory without checking it first!

This belief has become a tribal marker; an ideological litmus test. Accepting Musk’s claims of massive fraud is now a way to prove you’re on the "good," virtuous, non-thieving side. The side of responsible government, fiscal sanity, and accountability. The side that stands against bloated bureaucracies, corruption, and taxpayer waste.

To many Americans, what Musk and DOGE are doing represents hope. A possible turning point. A chance to finally see a government that isn’t a black hole of incompetence and waste. A government that stops funneling money into politically connected vanity projects, stops penalizing ordinary people for following the rules, and actually serves the taxpayers who fund it.

But none of that can happen unless the people leading these hopefully transformational changes have the decency, humility, and common fucking sense to recognize what they don’t know.

Musk failed that test.

Miserably.

And he continues to fail every single day that he refuses to correct the record, instead leaning into bad memes about how tragic it is that George Washington won’t be getting a Social Security check anymore.

Cluster B Matters

It’s blatantly obvious that President Trump is a narcissist.¹ There was no avoiding that dynamic in the last election, since Kamala Harris likely qualifies as one, too.

This isn’t entirely bad for the country. A narcissistic president desperately craves admiration. When what a leader wants most is to be loved by the people, they will go to great lengths to win that approval. There are worse qualities for a president than a deep-seated need to be admired by Americans.

But there’s a massive downside.

Narcissists are incredibly easy to manipulate. Anyone who grew up with a narcissistic parent learns to exploit their weaknesses before they can even drive. Their desperate need for validation makes them shockingly susceptible to flattery, selective information, and emotionally charged narratives.

For whatever reason—whether it’s because he’s flattered by Musk’s admiration, because his staff shields him from information they think he won’t like, or because he’s simply too distracted with other battles to pay attention—Trump hasn’t seemed to grasp that Musk is completely out of his depth here.

Being exceptional in one area does not make someone exceptional in all areas. But like many men with narcissistic tendencies, Musk clearly believes otherwise.

And so does a horrifying percentage of the center-right and right.

This mess proves one of two things. Either Musk is utterly out of his depth, so much so that he failed to understand what he was looking at and didn’t have the sense to check before broadcasting it to the world, or he knew exactly what he was doing and deliberately misled millions of people.

Maybe he wanted to stir outrage for engagement and influence. Maybe he saw an opportunity to cement his status as the “man exposing government corruption” and ran with it, facts be damned.

Maybe, in some deep way, he thrives on creating chaos because it makes him feel powerful.

Or maybe he’s just a well-meaning but power-drunk billionaire, riding a ketamine-fueled high, lashing out with no impulse control.

It’s hard to know which it is. But every day that passes without him issuing a correction makes it harder to believe he’s acting in good faith.

What Should Happen vs. What Will

Can anyone seriously expect Donald Trump’s administration to urge one of its key figures to show restraint and discipline on Twitter?

Of course not. This is going to keep happening.

Which means it’s on all of us to assume personal responsibility for using our goddamn brains. Step one to thinking instead of emoting: when something gives you a rush of righteous superiority and anger, stop and interrogate it.

If you can do that—if you can resist the high of certainty and the comfort of outrage—you might just see reality as it is.

Like a grown-up.

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EDIT: I received an email from a Subscriber, which I quote in full and with his/her permission.

Subject: “You are right about Social Security”

—and I should know—I work there.

Three things prevent people from “living forever” as Mr Musk has unwisely claimed they do.

A) We have what is called the Centenarian Project. When you have reached 100, the local field office will reach out for a face-to-face to confirm you exist.

B) If you are receiving Medicare and a certain amount of time goes by without it being used—the disabled and elderly tend to see doctors—you get benefits suspended until we get ahold of you.

C) If you turn 115, we reach out to you, and if no contact is made, we terminate you. Straight up. Systemically, or manually if necessary. I imagine I could count the number of 115-year-olds getting benefits in America on one hand.

(Now, if things are examined and some dozens or even a hundred were somehow being paid I would not be colossally shocked, but millions? Absurd!)

This is not to say that any of the three screens won’t catch you at first, usually due to malformed records, but the system will continue to run and alert, and eventually you will be hit—within months, not years—and someone will examine the record.

Records are malformed by current standards because when the modern system was put in place a couple of decades ago, records that had been established, say, in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc, could limp along poorly coded and make it.

When they were “converted” sometimes they coughed up and had to be fixed …. sometimes they didn’t, and remained submerged, hidden hazards for people like me to clean up later.

Converted records are sometimes unfixable—they have coded elements that are contradictory to modern standards and can never be repaired. They alert every few years, but literally nothing can be done for them.

So if a converted record with someone on it born in 1890 has death data improperly coded in the 1980s …. well that person may be T1 (dead) but there can't be a completed closure. The record won’t report as confirmed T1, just as dead for all practical purposes.

Also, a lot of people are T1 but have no proofs. A proof would be a death certiticate. If they were reported dead and we never got one—well, I think they are on the DOGE list. This is a very substantial number of people. If someone died in ‘Nam and was never on benefits … or on Okinawa … or last week in Peoria … anyone with an SSN and no death certificate submitted ... we have no motivation to track down a death certificate. It is not an issue.

Also, the 369-year-olds and what have you, I do not *know* but I can *guess* what is going on there: These are records of people which were entered incorrectly at a time when the system would not automatically reject them. If they never got benefits, there would be no time the system would raise a ruckus.

I am generally supportive of the reforms projected if skeptical of the process, but in this case for certain Elon is way over his skis.

Many thanks to my sexless, nameless subscriber for this valuable input!

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1. My friend

Josh Slocum

is the Cluster B whisperer. You should immediately subscribe to his Substack and watch his podcast.