What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Gold at Fort Knox
Last week, during an interview on Air Force One, a reporter asked Donald Trump if Elon Musk plans to cut the Pentagon budget once he’s done with the National Park Service and other agencies. Trump responded that Musk would look at Fort Knox instead.
I’m guessing there was an uncomfortably long pause before the reporter asked why. “To make sure the gold is there,” Trump responded.
Whether the gold is actually in Fort Knox is a question Musk asked a few days earlier in this post on X:
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This led many to believe that something had happened to the gold at Fort Knox. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but something … These people are (probably) wrong.
Of course, the gold is still in Fort Knox.
The most likely (and boring) Fort Knox scenario: All 147.3 million ounces of US gold are sitting there, waiting for you to dive in like Scrooge McDuck. All the bullion, which makes up half of the total US gold reserve, is kept in a closely guarded secret vault at a military base in Kentucky, as it has been since the 1940s. According to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Fort Knox is audited every year to ensure “all gold is present and accounted for.”
“The only gold seized was very small quantities used to test the purity of the gold during regularly scheduled inspections. Other than these samples, no gold has been moved in or out of the vault for many years,” the U.S. Mint confirms.
But isn’t that exactly what the US Mint would say? Maybe someone stole all the gold, or the government has been secretly selling the people’s bullion for years! Yes, probably not.
Conspiracy theories about Fort Knox
Musk and Trump aren’t saying anything new—rumors that “the gold isn’t really there ” have been circulating among conspiracy theorists since the 1940s, shortly after the US Bullion Vault was completed and gold was shipped from the coast to the center of the country to protect it from theoretical invaders.
Here are just a few of the conspiracy theories about Fort Knox:
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1952: The Daughters of the American Revolution claim gold was stolen from Fort Knox. President Truman invites them to inspect the vault, but they refuse.
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1973: Dr. Peter Beter (his real name) published The Plot Against the Dollar: The Spirit of the New Imperialism , which claims that “powerful Americans secretly allowed $20 billion worth of gold to be removed from Fort Knox. According to Beter, they took him through a secret tunnel into the vault.
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2009: Internet cranks claim Fort Knox gold bars were replaced with tungsten-filled counterfeits so the Clinton administration could sell the real gold.
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2010: Ron Paul wonders if there is gold in Fort Knox.
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Unknown: There are aliens there.
These conspiracy theories arise from a strange mixture of monetary policy controversies dating back to the 1800s, traders trying to get people to invest in gold schemes, and questions some people have about something secret that “the government doesn’t want you to know about.” Like everything else, the Internet gives people the time and space to spread and modernize ideas, but the Trump and Musk quotes are just overheated bullshit. And this isn’t even the golden age of Fort Knox conspiracy theories. This was in the 1970s, when fear about our nation’s gold was so widespread that the Treasury Department had a brief moment of transparency.
Then the press was allowed into Fort Knox.
There’s not much of it on the shelves in 2025, but Dr. Peter Beter’s (again, actually his name) book, The Plot Against the Dollar, was so influential in the early 1970s that the tabloids picked up on his claims, and soon members of Congress began receiving calls from constituents asking them to prove that Fort Knox’s gold reserves still existed. So in 1974, the Treasury Department sighed and said, “Okay,” and then invited members of Congress and members of the press to visit Fort Knox to see for themselves. This was the first time anyone other than Treasury employees had been allowed into the vault since a limited inspection was carried out in 1953.
A handful of congressmen and about 120 members of the media were ushered through 20-ton steel doors and shown gold bars. They picked them up. I weighed them. They even managed to see a secret tunnel, an escape hatch that ended in the building, a reliable protection for those who accidentally locked themselves in the vault.
The press photographed and filmed all this:
Even the most skeptical congressmen who toured the vault essentially concluded that “it looks like there’s gold in there,” and it appears that most Americans did, too. But for die-hard conspiracy theorists (and dummies), no amount of evidence is enough. Some ridiculed the visit as a “show audit” that proved nothing, and others came up with “the bars are filled with tungsten” theories, because even if people saw it and took pictures, it still wasn’t true.
Secretary of the Treasury Trump’s visit to Fort Knox in 2017
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said he would arrange a review for any senator who is interested in inspecting the vaults. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s first Treasury secretary, followed a similar policy. In 2017, Mnuchin, Mitch McConnell and other officials visited Fort Knox to evaluate the bullion. As an added bonus, their visit included viewing a total eclipse. What a lucky moment.
Here’s Mitch McConnell with gold bars. Amazing!
Apparently you can sign your name when you visit Fort Knox, like Mnuchin does here.
The exact purpose of Mnuchin and company’s visit to Fort Knox is unclear, but I am confident that they were engaged in important government business rather than just sightseeing, and if they had noticed any missing bars, they would have alerted the appropriate authorities.
Documents, crowns and a lot of drugs: strange things stored in Fort Knox
While the gold appears to be there, alien bodies (probably) aren’t stored at Fort Knox, but that doesn’t mean we don’t leave strange things there sometimes.
Back in the 1940s, as World War II devastated Europe, the U.S. government moved the signed original text of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and drafts of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into storage for safekeeping. The vault was used to store the Crown of St. Stephen until we sent it back to Hungary in 1978.
Until recently, Fort Knox was home to the United States’ strategic stockpile of painkillers: the vault once held 68,269 pounds of opium and morphine—that’s a lot of drugs! It is no longer stored there, and where it went is unknown. Why don’t you look into this , Elon Musk?
The vault still contains ten 1933 Double Eagle gold coins, a 1974-D aluminum cent, and twelve gold (22 karat) Sacagawea dollar coins that flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999.
Does gold at Fort Knox even matter?
It’s great that the US has a huge treasure trove the size of Smaug, but will it do us any good? The gold bars stored at Fort Knox have been collecting dust since the early 1940s, and we have done nothing with them and have no tangible impact on them. Our money hasn’t been directly tied to gold since the 1930s (or the 1970s; it’s complicated), so in some ways it doesn’t matter whether all the bars are filled with tungsten. Piles of gold serve primarily as a symbolic representation of our country’s wealth and stability—gold is very shiny, after all. Consider this: the total value of Fort Knox’s gold is $435 billion. The US national debt is $36.22 trillion . So even if we sold it all tomorrow, it would be a drop in the bucket. Like the cash hidden under the nation’s blanket, Fort Knox’s gold is our “if things get really bad, we’ll still have it.” This is money at the banana stand. If Elon Musk opens the vault doors and finds nothing in there, I hope he’s smart enough to keep it to himself.