The wealthiest man on earth was so distrustful of the nonpartisan experts at the Social Security Administration that he and his allies insisted on giving a 21-year-old former Silicon Valley intern sweeping access to personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans, living and dead, in hopes of proving his outlandish claims about fraudulent payments passing though the agency.
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team made no attempt to understand data the tech billionaire was citing when he began claiming that “massive fraud” was allowing Social Security payments to flow to “illegals” in a series of X posts in early February, despite warnings from Social Security officials who told them they did not know what they were talking about, the The New York Times reported.
Instead, he ordered 21-year-old Akash Bobba, a former Palantir intern who’d been hired as a programmer for DOGE, be granted access to Social Security data without proper training so he could run his own analysis, the Times reported
When the acting commissioner, Michelle King, declined to do so, Musk had her fired and replaced with Leland Dudek. Dudek, brought back from a suspension on the DOGE team’s recommendation, got Bobba the access.
But according to the Times, Bobba knew the Musk fraud claims were bunk.
He reportedly told others at the agency that he’d “tried to deliverthe accurate context” to the world’s richest person, apparently without success.
Citing interviews with dozens of people in the agency and throughout the Trump administration, the Times said Musk “became fixated” on Social Security after he and his team misread government spending data and began to believe, incorrectly, that they’d uncovered fraud at the nation’s old-age and disability pension program.
Musk’s team reportedly became so obsessed and driven to prove the false claims as true that they pushed SSA officials to disregard a court order cutting off DOGE’s access to sensitive data including Americans’ Social Security numbers, employment history and other sensitive matters, even as the SpaceX and Tesla CEO became a target for administration critics after he referred to the massively popular New Deal program as a “Ponzi scheme.”
One Musk ally, Michael Russo, was installed as the SSA’s chief information officer. He pushed the then-acting commissioner to have agency workers analyze the data the Tesla billionaire and his team were claiming to be evidence of fraudulent payments.
When the Social Security experts said the payments in question were valid, Russo ignored them and said Musk’s team wouldn’t accept the conclusions of civil servants.
Musk departed government service earlier this month amid a falling-out with Trump, but his outsized wealth and ownership of the X platform mean he could create chaos surrounding the GOP’s agenda and its plans for the 2026 midterms.
According to the most recent poll by The Economist and YouGov, a full 76 percent of Republicans see Musk favorably while just 18 percent view him unfavorably.
According to a poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College in late April, 77 percent of Republicans view Musk favorably.
The billionaire is more popular than House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, or almost anyone else in the GOP save for President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
But at the same time, just fifteen percent of Democrats and 34 percent of independents have favorable views of the tech mogul.
A week after he blew up his relationship with Trump by, among other things, accusing him of being a pedophile, Musk took to X to express regret over his war of words with the president and back down by conceding that “some” of his posts attacking the commander-in-chief had been excessive.
“I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,” he said, just days after Trump said “very disappointed” in his former special adviser and campaign donor for criticizing the “Big, Beautiful Bill” he is attempting to push through the Senate.
