Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by reustle 490 days ago
If this post is accurate (big if), wouldn't it prove that theory false?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076

2 comments

"And here's the number of RECIPIENTS of social security in each age bucket with the death field set to false (and recipient set to true). A mere 89,106 are aged 99+, not the tens of millions suggested by @elonmusk."

https://x.com/justinwolfers/status/1891678450487841007

Also Elon's other Tweet is: "Yes, there are FAR more “eligible” social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history."

Lawful permanent residents (LPRs), asylees (noncitizen who has been granted asylum in the United States), refugees, some temporary non-immigrants, etc all get social security numbers. Elon doesn't appear to research much before posting and has publicly stated that he'll often be wrong with respect to everything DOGE.

Yeah this is the part I find hard to suss out. If they said we have people who are 104 and the next oldest is 150 holy shit. That's case closed, but the link you sent makes me suspicious of the bias on the other side...

I agree with original comment. I just don't know who to trust to do a deep enough dive to give me good information.

This page I found ( https://iter.ca/post/1875-epoch/ ) had a link to some data from SSA: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v71n4/v71n4p33.html , and the "Individuals by YOB" section does indeed not show anything special about 1875 (and has people from before then).