No, It Wasn’t COBOL

Elon is much dumber than that.

I thought that the COBOL programming explanation of the default date was the reason that Musk mistakenly misattributed millions of dollars of Social Security payments to people who are 150 years old. No, it wasn’t COBOL. It is much worse than that.

Musk and his Muskrats don’t know how to interpret basic data. He claimed tens of millions of people over 100 were collecting Social Security.

Using freely available public information, we can see that a) there aren’t tens of millions of people in America over 100, so the claim is patently false right off the bat. This is the first red flag — there are only about 85,000 centenarians in the US to begin with.

Okay, so he’s claiming that the data is corrupted, and checks are being sent to millions who don’t exist.

What was his error here? He doesn’t know how to read the database. The “death field” in the “spreadsheet” being set to “false” doesn’t mean the person isn’t dead — it means that the Social Security administration doesn’t have a death certificate for them. Almost all of these people are old because documentation just wasn’t available for people who were born 229 years ago. It doesn’t mean that they are receiving benefits. The database Elon used didn’t display that information at all, but he was too dense to…