Elon Musk's unorthodox Oval Office appearance during which he claimed widespread fraud was overwhelming the Social Security system proved just how little he understands about government — and how little he cares about getting things right, argued Philip Bump in a new opinion piece for The Washington Post.
While standing next to a seated President Donald Trump last week as his toddler pulled faces, Musk claimed that a “cursory examination of Social Security," revealed "people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who is 150?” Musk added, "I think they’re probably dead. That’s my guess.”
Bump wrote that "it didn’t take long for other tech guys to point out a probable explanation for those 150-year-olds, one that Musk should probably have considered: It was what a data error in an old system often looks like — a function of date values being left blank in a database or outdated records or both."
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In other words, not some vast conspiracy to steal taxpayer money and certainly not evidence of "the biggest fraud in history.”
"But Musk isn’t very interested in the truth," Bump argued. "His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older."
Bump wrote, "The result is a weird variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which Musk and his lackeys appear to know too little about how government systems work to understand what they don’t know. Instead of then realizing the gaps in that knowledge and tempering future comments, Musk builds a defensive position around his claims, constructed of partisan tropes and attacks on his critics. It unfairly reinforces skepticism in the government. But that’s entirely the point."