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.
