"There's crazy things, like, just a cursory examination of Social Security and we've got people in there that are about 150 years old," Musk said. "Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they're missing out."

Musk used this evidence to justify hacking into the system to look for fraud, but his team was not as bright as he thought they were.

Those kids don’t realise that Social Security uses ancient computers. They’re programmed with an old version of the language COBOL that is nearly as old as me. It all comes down to history.

On May 20, 1875, the International Bureau of Weight and Measures established uniform standards of mass and length. Later, it established rules for dates as well. The date standard used a starting date of May 20, 1875, to honour the Bureau's creation.

Social Security’s computers use an older version of COBOL and have that date as a baseline. Dates are stored as the number of days after May 20, 1875.

If Social Security doesn’t know a birthdate, that field is empty in its records. A person appears to have been born on May 20, 1875, about 150 years ago.

Musk and his team did not wonder why all these 150-year-olds shared the same birthday - May 20, 1875—or what it is about the astrological sign of Taurus that turns someone into a fraudster in their golden years. Instead, they shot their mouths out about a non-existent conspiracy.

It also questions his team’s ability to do much within these big government databases if they don’t know COBOL. If someone who has not coded in decades can spot what the problem is and his team can’t, maybe he should be hiring a few old coders instead of these young, ignorant upstarts.