“Vampires”: Musk’s war on Social Security is fueled by Republicans’ view of retired people’s value

“Social Security is not being touched,” Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga tried to assuage his panicked Michigan constituents earlier this month. The congressman may be misinformed or simply lying. Either way, his words were not true. Social Security is facing an all-out assault from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) — and voters know it.

“We worked our entire life,” one panicked retiree declared at Huizenga’s most recent town hall, held via teleconference. “But we can’t get any help because we can’t get through to anybody.” The former teacher was featured in an Associated Press report from the weekend detailing how angry and frightened Social Security recipients are storming town halls, begging their congressional representatives to stop Musk’s misnamed DOGE from taking away their benefits. Donald Trump won this part of the state with over 60% of the vote, but now voters are begging their Republican representative to save them from the consequences of their electoral choices. 

As the New York Times reported Monday, Musk’s DOGE “has taken its chain saw to the agency’s operations,” trying to institute mass layoffs and office closures, which “could create gaping holes in the agency’s infrastructure, destabilizing the program.” There have even been efforts to destroy the phone service that allows beneficiaries to call the Social Security Administration for help. On Monday, Popular Info released a leaked memo from Trump’s management to Social Security workers, detailing how the administration is well aware that the planned cuts will dramatically increase “demand for office appointments” — even as Musk is shutting down offices, making those appointments even harder to secure. The result, according to Trump’s own appointees, will be “service disruption,” and “delayed processing” of payments to retirees. 

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Musk loves to play word games when defending his assault on a program that helps keep millions of elderly and disabled people from falling into poverty. He insists he’s merely trying to attack “waste and fraud” in the program, falsely claiming that $700 billion a year can be categorized this way. (Reality-based assessments show that it’s likely less than 1% of that figure for the entire federal government, not just Social Security.) To justify this outright disinformation, Musk has insisted that “millions of people” getting Social Security checks are “definitely dead,” calling them “vampires” and declaring “tax dollars are being stolen.”

It’s not true, and we can call this a lie, because Musk has repeatedly been told the retirees he calls “definitely dead” are very much alive. He refuses to back down or admit he was wrong. Instead, he disparages Social Security altogether. “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s show earlier this month. Musk has long obsessed over the idea that low birthrates and the subsequent aging population are “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” While he tends to emphasize the “more babies” part of the equation to fix this alleged problem, it’s not much of a leap to see that “fewer old people” would also get the job done. Musk is savvy enough to know better than to say this about the U.S., but he’s been happy to say it of France, denouncing the nation for having a retirement age of 62, only three years short of the U.S. He complains these retirement ages were “set when life spans were much shorter” and it’s “impossible for a small number of workers to support a massive number of retirees.”

Musk frames retired people in parasitical terms, not seeing them as those who have paid their dues and have earned their reward. In light of that, when he speaks of “waste” in Social Security, he’s hinting at this broader view that retired people are inherently illegitimate. While he couches language like “vampire” and “fraud” in false claims that he’s talking about illegal payments, the accumulated impact of his rhetoric is to demonize elderly people as a useless burden on society. When the end goal is “efficiency,” it’s easy to get to this view that retired people are an “inefficiency” and “redundancy” that should no longer be funded. 

The ugly attitude towards elderly people is an inevitable result of the profoundly anti-human views and ideology of Musk and his compatriots in the tech billionaire world. Tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk for decades now, explained to the New York Times that the billionaire views himself as “the person who matters the most,” and that “everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character,” which is video game slang for preprogrammed characters in a video game.

Musk hinted at this during his Rogan interview, complaining, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” While insisting “you should care about other people,” he made it clear this was rear-covering nonsense. His larger point was that empathy is “civilizational suicidal” and “the empathy response” is “a bug in Western civilization.” The larger interview painted a picture of a man full of contempt for other people, with all their needs and subjective experiences, when he would rather they be compliant automatons who fulfill his demands without resistance. He fantasized about replacing people with “artificial intelligence” and robots, even talking up the incel-inflected dream of replacing women with sex robots.

Musk and his fellow techno-fascists often cast themselves as the saviors of “civilization,” but that rhetoric is only there to put an ennobling gloss on a deeply sociopathic view: that human beings exist to serve the system, and not that the system is there to serve humanity. In this case, the system is capitalism, which has taken on a near-religious status to Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite. It’s an attitude that’s inherently eugenicist, measuring people’s value solely in terms of whether they can be utilized to make more money for the already-wealthy investor class. It’s why Musk has no respect for federal workers whose labor is centered around helping people, not profits. And it’s certainly not a worldview that has space for retirees, people who, by definition, are out of the paid labor market.

Causing people who have earned their Social Security to lose benefits doesn’t look like an unintended consequence of “efficiency.” It’s becoming clear that it is Musk’s end goal.