Elon Musk Eyeballing You And Your Grandma’s Social Security Money
Of course he is.
The Sieg-Heiling has immolated his brand, the DOGE squids sequestered at the GSA are reeking and begging for a washer and dryer, his daughter has accused him of sex-selecting to make male babies, and SOMEbody hacked his hellsite. But Elon Musk’s got bigger things on his mind: eliminating Social Security! Is it even fun to be a billionaire if you can’t starve elderly widows to death?
Monday night Musk dropped into the safe space of the Fox News studio to repeat right-wing lies about Social Security and throw in some new whoppers, while Larry Kudlow, vice-chair of the America First Policy Institute under Linda McMahon, nodded sagely as if gutting Social Security was an idea he was hearing for the first time instead of what Republicans have been creaming their jeans over their entire greedy, craven little lives.
Kudlow started his Musk interview with poor you, you got hacked, what happened?
MUSK: Well, we’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.
Hackers smart enough to deploy a massive attack don’t know how to use a VPN? Sure, Jan. Sounds more like a certain immigrant is trying to cook up a not-so-subtle excuse to shut down Ukraine’s Starlink.
Kudlow quickly moved on to the real purpose for the visit: What motivates sweet, charitable, brilliant Elon to want to help out the government?
Musk primed Kudlow’s pump by singing him the seductive song of their people, the ballad of waste and fraud.
KUDLOW: What motivates you to do this? […] It’s tough sledding.
MUSK: Yeah, it is tough sledding. But I think we’re doing the right thing here. There’s been a tremendous amount of waste and fraud in the government. When you’re part of the government, you saw a lot of that, and if you look at the Inspector General reports and the Government Accountability Office, there have been many audits that have pointed out that there’s a tremendous amount of waste and fraud in the government.
As Trump’s special-employee-advisor-friend, Elon is not really a part of the government. Though he did send Starlink employee Michael Russo and 22-year-old software engineer Akash Bobba to delve into the source code at Social Security, giving them the ability to “audit” and export the system’s most sensitive data, including the most personal financial information of everybody with a Social Security number. Hope they didn’t write over any of YOUR payment data, turning you into a waste and fraud! So the guy who can’t even keep decent firewalls around his own groyper platform is letting randos frolic in all your most sacred numbers, with no responsible adult in the room checking their work or making sure it doesn’t get leaked all over the place. But Elon’s not the fraud, grandma’s the fraud, shut up!
Musk went on:
Why are the 20 million people who are definitely dead marked as alive in the Social Security database? Why were hundreds of millions of dollars of Small Business Administration loans given out to people aged 11 and under, according to the Social Security? Like these must be some very enterprising eight-year-olds, you know? And some pretty strong 150-year-olds.
Still, Kudlow gushed about how DOGE is so transparent people can go line-by-line and see their cuts. Yes, that’s how two weeks ago we learned that their cuts were highly fudged, at best:
I think the GAO identified that there were 17 million dead people in the Social Security database several years ago. It’s now 20 million. But nobody did anything about it. [...] So basically, if the government sends money out to whether it’s wasteful or fraudulent, nobody complains if they receive money.
Wha wha wha what, over the course of three years, millions of people died in America? Oh right: Yes.
Just because there is a Social Security number in the database does not mean someone is getting a check, and Musk and DOGE have yet to produce one name of a dead or fake person receiving a check. Sure, accidental overpayments happen, but it’s less than one percent of payments, and frauds are prosecuted. Also, last year when Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General asked Congress for more money to modernize their systems and make that one percent maybe even smaller, they were denied.
Here’s noted communists Forbes with their own “what kind of ketamine are you smoking”:
Musk argued in an interview with Fox Business that “waste and fraud in entitlement spending” is “the big one” for the government “to eliminate,” claiming there’s “a half trillion, maybe 600 or 700 billion a year” in wasteful and fraudulent spending—which there is no evidence to support, as that would represent nearly a third of the $1.5 trillion Social Security paid out last year and approximately 20% of the amount spent on Social Security and Medicare combined.
Twenty percent fraud! Did somebody let Rick Scott run a health care company again?!
But don’t worry, Cindy-Lou Who, Musk is here to fix the Christmas tree:
MUSK: The goal here is let’s not have America go bankrupt with waste and fraud. So that’s what I’m here for. And we’re making good progress. [...] We’re just getting things done as opposed to writing a report. Like I say, reports don’t mean anything. You’ve got to actually take action.
So I mean, the waste report in entitlement spending, which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements. So that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe 600, 700 billion a year.
“Entitlements” is an interesting way to frame YOUR money, the money every working person has paid into their whole lives. It’s called an entitlement because people are entitled to it, stoopit.
And here comes the inevitable “blaming immigrants” part. It is conservative yoga, focusing on an imaginary problem and then opening their third eye to find a path to blame immigrants for it. It’s extra rich, because Musk himself is reportedly an illegal immigrant! Double standards are their only kind.
That is also a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters. So this is why the Democrats are so upset about the situation, because they’re losing, you know, if we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave.
But yeah, I mean, where you’ll see the biggest outcry is from the Democrats who are, they don’t want the waste report to be turned off because it is a gigantic magnet to attract illegal immigrants and have them stay in the country.
Illegal immigrants pay billions into Social Security — $25 billion in 2022! — and they don’t get any of it back. We just think it’s important to point out every time these bitches be lying.
Watch it come from his own lips while Kudlow HMMS, MM HMMS, UH HUHS, nods and says YESSS, if you want.
Former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley predicted that there will be a system collapse and an interruption of benefits within the next 30 to 90 days 11 days ago, even before Musk made these elimination noises. Can’t wait to see how the Trump cultists will try to spin that as a win, if true. Too bad it won’t only affect the dumbshits who voted for him!
But if grandma’s check doesn’t come and there’s nobody there to answer the phone, did the fraud even really happen?
You know what would be great to have? Some kind of bureau that’s there to protect consumers from fraud. Maybe we could even have a governmental accountability office, and people whose job it is to generally inspect such things! Oh wait, we already ordered that with our tax dollars, but we got this hair weave and a squad of virgins instead. Seems pretty fraudy!
Save up and sharpen your pitchforks, grandma.
The richest guy in the world doesn't give a flying fuck if grandma (or you!) dies (or is kicked out of her home because the money she is entitled to is withheld and she can't pay rent). It's not enough to be obscenely rich, you've got to make everyone else poorer and/or deader.
Maybe if Musk paid taxes like the rest of us, he’d realize SOCIAL SECURITY and MEDICARE are OUR OWN MONEY, so YOU’RE GD RIGHT WE’RE ENTITLED TO IT. He and Trump and Congress can FAFO what happens if they go there.