The team, which was looking for abuse in the systems, believed he had already found a huge money hole.
Elon Musk has repeatedly repeated that there are 150-year-olds in social security systems who are paid benefits Aaron Schwartz
The recent president of the United States Donald Trump enabled as a digital expert in the administration Elon Musk has aroused an uproar by claiming that many people over the age of 150 would increase social benefits. The discovery of impossibly elderly people in the administration systems has since been revealed as a misunderstanding and a data processing error.
Musk also mentioned this in X and as a picture of the statistics of how many age groups were “False” for the death period, which one might think that the person was not yet dead. Musk joked that maybe the vampire book series Twilight is true and many vampires are raising social security money.
Shortly after Musk’s claim, it was pointed out that the fault would be due to the cobol programming language launched in the 1950s and how the missing dates in that language would be assumed for 1875. Another pointed out that this was not the case and that it would not be the standard feature of the Cobol.
The debate revealed, in many of the US administration’s cobol systems, the default time for missing information is set in the 19th century. For example, the subject has been reported Wired.
The wrong information on Cobol’s epic time was widespread before it started to survive.
The confusion may also have been created that before the current standards, the time has been dealt with in systems in different ways. For example, Unix systems have a really time-time zero point, or epoch,: 1 January 1970 at 0.00 am UTC. Unix time is expressed in seconds of this time. Negative numbers indicate time before that time.
The last war widow of the Civil War did not die until 2021
ABC News According to 2023-2024, the US Social Security Administration has stated that its systems contain 18.9 million social security number for people born before 1920 and are not marked dead.
SSA has hardly paid benefits to the 150-year-olds: even if information is missing, the administration system assume People over 115 were dead and dissolve the payment of benefits.
For example, the last of the US Civil War (1861-1865) Veteran’s widow Helen Viola Jackson received a widow pension for war veteran before died in 2020, The Guardian reported. Jackson had married a veteran as a teenager in the 1930s.
The administration decided not to renew the old system because it would have cost more than $ 9 million. In addition, according to SSA, none of these people born in 1920 or earlier received paid benefits in 2015.
In the end, Musk’s claim did not reveal to the general public a large -scale abuse of social benefits, but what problems are in managing old system information.
Young coders and IT experts have been hired as employees of the Dog Department, which is led by the Musk-led digital leap, so they may not even be considered to consider the effects of old coding practices on the nature of systems and databases.