We have entered the age when Elon Musk must be stupid — at least according to the Trump-demented. This might remind you of my article on last New Year's Eve, Legacy Media: Trump MUST Be Wrong.
Again, this is only according to legacy media, and some of the Trump-addled on X.
So this time, we're hearing from multiple sources that this dummy Musk and those dumb kids he hired for DOGE don't know nuthin' 'bout' — oh wait, that's Gone With The Wind — don't understand how that ancient programming language COBOL works. As proof, they claim that COBOL handles dates oddly, and a date of 0 or an empty date field defaults to May 20, 1875. (Some people claimed May 5, 1875, but for my purposes, I'm going to stick with May 20.)
Of course, that would mean that anyone with no recorded birthdate would look to be 150 years old.
I have to admit, when I first saw that proposed, I thought it was not implausible. It would mean that for some reason, COBOL dates started on that date (technically, May 20, 1875, was the "COBOL epoch").
Of course, this is a perfect story for the TDS sufferers. It makes Musk a fool and proves those wiz kids in their 20s aren't really qualified to be exploring the IRS and Social Security Administration files, and — of course — that Trump MUST Be Wrong.
Related: Why Government Computers Are Such a Mess
But then, we got more information. It turned out that Musk had just used "150 years old" as an example.
According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/ltb06VX98Z
In fact, there were 1.3 million people in the Social Security rolls who were between 150 and 159 years old, nearly 12 million older than 110 years, 139 between 220 and 229 years old, and one Lazarus of more than 360 years.
Okay, that blows the default date out of the water. But I still was puzzled where such a specific date had come from.
At this point, my research assistant Grok and I buckled down and searched for where that date originated.
The original assertion had been that COBOL uses the ISO8601 standard, and that standard was where the magic epoch date originated. But the actual standard doesn't have an epoch date at all — it just says dates are stored per standard as Year-Month-Day, all numbers, so YYYYMMDD. But if you follow the Wiki history of changes (Grok came in real handy on this), you find that:
The 2004 version (ISO 8601:2004, Section 3.2.1) mentions May 20, 1875, but not as an epoch—it’s a historical note about the Gregorian calendar’s use in standards, linked to the Metre Convention. It’s not a directive to set zero to that date; it’s just context for the proleptic Gregorian system stretching back indefinitely.
But when the ISO8601 standard was revised in 2019, even that was deleted. If you follow the Wikipedia history — a herculean task; no one is as prolix as Wikipedia editors on a controversial topic — it turns out that the bit from the 2004 version of the standard was on the Wiki page but removed very shortly after the whole 1875 fuss started.
What we have learned is (1) the actual data, once Musk published it, shows many more records with questionable birth dates, and the questionable dates don't cluster around the magic date anyway, and (2) the only source appears to be a misreading of the Wikipedia page. It would be unkind of me to suggest it was a convenient misreading, but in any case, a misreading.
If anyone can document that date in some reliable source, I'd be pleased to see it, but right now I think this game of telephone has come to a conclusion.
So what?
Some people then asked, basically, why do we care if 20 million individuals' records in Social Security are wrong?
There's actually a good reason. According to Musk, those totals represent people with early birth dates who are not identified as "deceased" in the records. Our ancient mariners may not matter much, but there are around 53 million people who are in the records as living but who are somewhere between elderly and extremely old.
The reason we care is that when the records are wrong, it opens the door to fraud. The New York State Comptroller, Thomas O. DeNapoli, has been diligent in looking for pension fraud in New York State:
New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten and the New York State Police announced the arraignment of Sharon Collins, 73, of Ithaca, New York yesterday for allegedly stealing $69,481 in state pension payments meant for her deceased husband.
Two Poughkeepsie women allegedly cashed seven pension checks totaling $8,600 meant for one of the defendants’ deceased mother, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, Dutchess County District Attorney Anthony Parisi and Dutchess County Sheriff Kirk Imperati announced today. The two defendants, Deborah Brink, 63, and Sheila Moseley, 58, are charged with grand larceny.
Gregory Mathieu, 40, appeared before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun on Nov. 19, facing charges that include first-degree corrupting the government, two counts of second-degree grand larceny, two counts of first-degree identity theft, and four counts of first-degree offering a false instrument for filing.
Prosecutors allege Mathieu exploited his position as an Associate Retirement Benefits Examiner with the New York City Employees’ Retirement System (NYCERS) to carry out the thefts between February 2021 and January 2024.
And that's why it matters.
Now, some people in the legacy media claimed that Musk thought all those people were fraudulently receiving Social Security checks, but I haven't found anywhere reliable saying that. ("Reliable" in this context means directly quoting Musk, not filtered through a reporter.) But the point is that having this kind of corrupt data in a database is the sort of hole a fraudster can extract money from.
