Elon Musk revealed on Tuesday that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency found some supposed 150-year-olds on the Social Security rolls. The multibillionaire entrepreneur and leader of the government reform said in remarks to the media in the Oval Office alongside President Donald Trump that his team is discovering some “crazy things” as they open Uncle Sam’s books. “Just a cursory examination of Social Security and we’ve got people in there that are about 150 years old,” Musk told reporters.
“Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t,” he continued. “They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re missing out.” “So, you know, that’s the case where, like, I think they’re probably dead is my guess, or they should be very famous.
One of the two,” he added. If one the Guinness Book of World Records, one learns that the oldest person to ever live, at least in modern history, was 122-year-old Jeanne Calment, a French woman born in 1875 who died in 1997. Sarah Knauss, an American, was 119 when she died in 1999.
There are several other people born in the late nineteenth century who managed to see the end of the twentieth or the start of the twenty-first. If we revert to the Iron Age, we see some even older people. Jehoiada, a priest in the kingdom of Judah during the reign of Ahaziah and Joash, died at 130.
In the earliest centuries of mankind, we of course have Methuselah, who the book of Genesis tells us lived to be 9.