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In an interview with Larry Kudlow, Elon Musk claimed that fraud in Social Security and other major programs was “the big one to eliminate.”
- March 11, 2025Updated 12:40 p.m. ET
Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, suggested on Monday that his government cost-cutting team would scrutinize Social Security and other entitlement spending, describing the expenditures as rife with fraudulent transactions and repeating a conspiracy theory that Democrats were using the programs as a “gigantic magnet to attract illegal immigrants and have them stay in the country.”
In an interview with Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business commentator who served as Mr. Trump’s chief economic adviser in his first term, Mr. Musk said that his team now numbered over 100 staff members and repeated familiar and unsupported claims about entitlement spending that dovetailed with the great replacement conspiracy theory — the idea that white Americans are deliberately being pushed out by noncitizens — which Mr. Musk has nodded to on other occasions.
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending, which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements,” he claimed, “so that’s the big one to eliminate.”
Earlier this month, Mr. Musk referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” And he has dispatched members of his cost-cutting team — known as the Department of Government Efficiency — to access databases housed at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency that manages the health coverage of more than 100 million people, to flag suspicious payments.
Contrary to Mr. Musk’s claims on Monday, undocumented immigrants working in the United States do not collect Social Security payments, but they pay tens of billions of dollars into the program every year. An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that in 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed more than $25 billion in Social Security taxes. Those funds effectively act as a subsidy for American beneficiaries.
Mr. Musk has frequently seized on limited discoveries over the course of his audits of federal agencies, publicizing minor accounting hiccups as evidence of systematic fraud.
