Each day Elon Musk underlines his status as the world’s first pure cringe elemental. The thin-skinned billionaire, who may soon become the world’s first trillionaire, has spent years detonating his once-positive reputation through a series of generally moronic and crushingly unfunny pronouncements
Over the past year, Musk has alienated liberals by cozying up to Trump amidst his disastrous tenure as the head of DOGE, before also alienating MAGA by coming after Trump himself for his Jeffrey Epstein connections. Then it was revealed that Musk himself had begged to visit his pedophile island. And people used to think that this guy was some kind of genius?
Now, as per Chuck Borges, former chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, Musk’s DOGE screwups may result in every single SSN ever assigned having to be changed and reissued.
Borges explained that Musk’s DOGE team uploaded the “Numident”, a master database containing extraordinarily sensitive SSN data to a cloud server without security controls, essentially potentially exposing every single person (living and dead!) in America to identity theft.
“A risk to literally every single living and dead American”
As he explained in an interview with PBS:
“To put that personally identifiable information that can be used to propagate identity theft, mortgage fraud, steal small business loans, impersonate dead people into an environment where it could be downloaded or accessed inappropriately or stolen or shared, it’s a risk to literally every single living and dead American’s ability to have a daily life.”
Borges underlines that the Trump administration is refusing to acknowledge any documentation on this, so there’s no way for an individual to check whether their data has been compromised.
Frankly, it seems like there’s panic behind the scenes. The government initially said the database hadn’t been compromised, only for them to admit that their previous statements about DOGE’s level of access were inaccurate and confirm that Social Security’s security policies had indeed been violated.
Once the genie is out of the box, it cannot be stuffed back inside, and Borges has explained that the only possible solution would be to “reissue every Social Security number.” That in itself would be hugely expensive, massively disruptive, and result in inevitable bureaucratic snafus.
But hey, this was an Elon Musk project, so it being run by incompetent idiots and costing infinitely more than it was supposed to save kinda comes with the territory…
Published: Feb 17, 2026 06:39 am