Elon Musk Left The Fate Of Your Social Security Payments In The hands Of A 21-year-old DOGE Tech Bro

Source: Independent, Andrew Feinberg
Photo: Trump Musk Business Fallout (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The former Palantir intern has acknowledged that Musk’s claims about rampant fraud at the agency were false

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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.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-doge-social-security