What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The Gold at Fort Knox

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Last week during an interview on Air Force One, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether Elon Musk was planning to cut the Pentagon's budget when he's finished with the National Park Service and other departments. Trump responded that Musk will instead be looking at Fort Knox.

I'm assuming there was a uncomfortably long pause before the reporter asked why. "To make sure the gold is there,” Trump responded.

Whether the gold is actually at Fort Knox is a question Musk had posed a few days previously in this post on X:

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This has led many to believe that something happened to the gold at Fort Knox. No one knows exactly what happened, but something. Those people are (probably) wrong.

Of course the gold is still at Fort Knox

The most likely (and boring) Fort Knox scenario: all 147.3 million ounces of U.S. gold are sitting there, waiting for you to dive in like Scrooge McDuck. All the bars, half of the U.S. total gold reserves, are safe in a heavily guarded, secretive vault on a Kentucky military installation, just as they've been since the 1940s. According to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, there is an audit of Fort Knox every year and that “all the gold is present and accounted for.”

"The only gold removed has been very small quantities used to test the purity of gold during regularly scheduled audits. Except for these samples, no gold has been transferred to or from the Depository for many years," confirms the U.S. Mint.

But isn't that exactly what the U.S. Mint would say? Maybe someone has been stealing all the gold, or the government has been secretly selling the people's bullion for years! Yeah, probably not.

Conspiracy theories about Fort Knox

Musk and Trump are not saying anything new—murmurs of "the gold is not really there" have been common among conspiracy theorists since the 1940s, soon after construction was completed on The United States Bullion Depository and the gold was shipped from the coasts to the heartland to protect it from theoretical invaders.

Here are only some of the conspiracy theories about Fort Knox:

• 1952: The Daughters of the American Revolution allege that the gold has been stolen from Fort Knox. President Truman invites them to inspect the vault but they decline.

• 1973: Dr. Peter Beter (his actual name) published The Conspiracy Against the Dollar: The Spirit of the New Imperialism, a book that contends "powerful Americans have secretly permitted $20 billion worth of gold to be removed from Ft. Knox. According to Beter, they took it out through a secret tunnel in the vault.

• 2009: Online cranks assert that Fort Knox's gold bars were replaced with tungsten-filled forgeries so the real gold could be sold by the Clinton administration.

• 2010: Ron Paul questions whether there is gold at Fort Knox.

• Unknown: There are aliens there.

These conspiracy theories spring from a weird mix of monetary policy disagreements that date back to the 1800s, hucksters trying to get people to invest in gold schemes, and the questions some people have about anything secret that "the government doesn't want you to know." Like everything else, the internet gives people time and space to spread and modernize ideas, but the Trump/Musk quotes are just warmed-over bullshit. And this isn't even the golden age of Fort Knox conspiracy theories. That was during the 1970s, when fear about our nation's gold was so pervasive, the Treasury Department had a brief moment of transparency.

That time the press was allowed into Fort Knox

It's not on many people's shelves in 2025, but Dr. Peter Beter's (again, really his name) The Conspiracy Against the Dollar was influential enough in the early 1970s that tabloids picked up on his claims, and soon members of Congress were getting calls from constituents, calling for proof that the Fort Knox gold reserves were still there. So in 1974, the Treasure Department sighed and said, "fine," then invited members of Congress and the press to visit Fort Knox to see for themselves. This was the first time anyone other than treasury employees had been allowed inside the vault since a limited audit was conducted in 1953.

A handful of congresspeople and about 120 members of the media were escorted behind 20-ton steel doors and shown the gold bars. They picked them up. Weighed them. They even got to see the secret tunnel, an escape hatch that ends in the building, a failsafe for anyone accidentally locked in the vault.

The press took pictures and shot film of all of it:

Even the most skeptical congresspeople who toured the vault basically concluded "looks like the gold's there," and so, it seems, did most Americans. But for diehard conspiracy theorists (and dummies) no amount of evidence is enough. Some derided the visit as a "show audit" that proved nothing, and others concocted "the bars are filled with tungsten" theories because even if people saw it and took pictures, it's still not true.

Trump's Treasury Secretary's 2017 visit to Fort Knox

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently has said he would arrange an inspection for any senator who is interested in seeing the vaults. Steven Mnuchin, Trump's first treasury secretary, had a similar policy. In 2017, Mnuchin, Mitch McConnell, and other officials visited Fort Knox to review the bullion. Their visit included a viewing of the total eclipse as an added bonus. What good timing.

Here's Mitch McConnell with gold bars. Adorable!

Credit: US Treasury Department

Apparently you can sign your name when you visit Fort Knox, as Mnuchin does here.

Credit: US Treasury Department

The exact purpose of Mnuchin and company's Fort Knox outing isn't clear, but I'm sure they were conducting important governmental business, not just sightseeing, and if they had noticed any missing bars, they would have alerted the proper authorities.

Documents, crowns, and lots of narcotics: strange things stored at Fort Knox

While the gold seems to be there, alien bodies are (probably) not stored at Fort Knox, but that doesn't mean we don't put weird things down there sometimes.

Back in the 1940s, with World War II ravaging Europe, the U.S. government moved the signed original Constitution of the United States, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, and drafts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into the vault for safe-keeping. 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 U.S.'s strategic reserves of pain-killers: At one time, 68,269 pounds of opium and morphine were stored in the vault—that's a lot of narcotics! It isn't stored there any longer, and where it went is not public. Why don't you look into that, Elon Musk?

Still in the vault are 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 the gold in Fort Knox even matter?

It's cool that we have a great huge Smaug-sized treasure trove in the U.S., but does it do us any good? The gold bars stored in Fort Knox have been gathering dust since the early 1940s, and we don't do anything with them and they don't affect anything tangible. Our money hasn't been directly tied to gold since the 1930s (or 1970s; it's complicated) so in a sense it doesn't matter whether all the bars are filled with tungsten. The piles of gold serve mainly as a symbolic representation of our nation's wealth and stability—gold is very shiny, after all. Consider this: Fort Knox's gold is worth $435 billion, total. The U.S. nation debt is $36.22 trillion. So even if we were to sell it all tomorrow, it would be a drop in the bucket. Like the cash hidden under the nation's blanket, Fort Knox gold is our "if things get really bad, we still have this." It's the money in the banana stand. If Elon Musk opens the vault doors and does find nothing there, I hope he's smart enough to keep it to himself.