Elon Musk Casts Doubt On $425 Billion U.S. Gold Reserve At Fort Knox Ahead Of Personal DOGE Audit

(February 18, 2025 - Ernest Hoffman, Kitco News)

(Kitco News) – Fresh off his recent forays into the Treasury Department’s payment systems, tech billionaire Elon Musk is now gearing up to conduct an in-person audit of the United States’ gold reserves at Fort Knox on behalf of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk announced his intentions on Monday afternoon through a pair of posts on his X platform, implying that he doubts whether the $425 billion in bullion is really there.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the state where Fort Knox is located, said in an interview with Fox News on Monday that he invited Musk to review the gold reserve after failing to gain access to the facility for a decade.

"I think some of them may not think it needs to be audited all the time, but I think the more sunlight, the better, more transparency, the better,” Paul said.

The Senator also insisted that even though the U.S. dollar hasn’t been explicitly backed by gold for over 50 years, the precious metal still provides some of the value undergirding the greenback.

“It brings attention to the fact that gold still has value and implicitly, not explicitly, but implicitly, gold still gives value to the dollar,” Paul said. “That's why we don't get rid of it. We've got it. The IMF has it, the World Bank has it. Most of the central banks… around the world have gold, and it's an implicit trust that the dollar still has some backing.”

With over 8,100 tonnes as of the end of 2024, according to the World Gold Council, the United States has far and away the world's largest gold reserve. The lion’s share of the nation’s bullion is stored at the 108,955-acre Fort Knox complex, with the balance kept in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Paul said he’s been trying “to make sure it's all there” for over 10 years without success. He received permission to enter Fort Knox in 2017 during the first Trump administration, but the timing of the trip didn’t work out. Instead, then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., visited the vaults without him, and returned claiming the gold was present.

“I didn't get to go down, but the Secretary of Treasury and the senior Senator from Kentucky did go down and attest that they believe they saw the gold down there.”

Musk has not announced when he and DOGE staff intend to visit Fort Knox or what methods he would use to verify the quantity and authenticity of the bullion. However, in response to an earlier post from Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), who also shared his frustrated attempts to visit Fort Knox, Musk seemed to suggest that a live video walkthrough of the top-secret facility may be part of the plan.