Trump and Elon Musk will go to Fort Knox to make sure no one 'stole' U.S. gold. How that conspiracy theory got started.

Despite assurances made last week by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that all of the U.S. gold reserves kept at the Fort Knox military installation are “present and accounted for,” President Trump continues to insist that he and Elon Musk will soon travel to Kentucky to make sure the gold bars haven’t been stolen.

“We're going to open up the doors. I'm going to see we have gold there. We want to find out, did anybody steal the gold in Fort Knox?” Trump said in a speech last week to the Republican Governors Association.

During his remarks at Conservative Political Action Committee on Saturday, Trump said that he and his senior adviser Elon Musk would pay a visit to the heavily guarded military installation about 40 miles south of Louisville and went so far as to speculate about what might happen when the door to the vault is opened.

"Wouldn't that be terrible? We open [it] up, and this Fort Knox has got nothing. It's just solid granite that's 5 feet thick. The front door, you need six musclemen to open it up. I don't even think they have windows. Wouldn't that be terrible if we opened it up and there was no gold there? So, we're going to open those doors, we're going to take a look. And if there's 27 tons of gold, we'll be very happy," Trump said.

Days before Trump’s remarks, Musk had already given Fort Knox conspiracy theorists more fodder.

“Who is confirming that gold wasn’t stolen from Fort Knox?” he wrote in a Feb. 17 post on X. “Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not. That gold is owned by the American public! We want to know if it’s still there.”

The latest fascination with Fort Knox

Fort Knox and the safety of just over half of the nation’s gold reserves has long been a subject that has captured the American imagination, inspiring novels and numerous conspiracy theories alleging that the gold may have been relocated or stolen. In the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, the eponymous villain seeks to detonate a dirty atomic bomb inside Fort Knox so as to contaminate the gold and destroy the U.S. economy.

The current dust-up over the United States Bullion Depository, aka Fort Knox, seems to have started with a tweet by the far-right Libertarian financial website Zero Hedge.

“It would be great if @elonmusk could take a look inside Fort Knox just to make sure the 4,580 tons of US gold is there. Last time anyone looked was 50 years ago in 1974,” the Zero Hedge X account wrote on Feb. 15.

Musk responded, writing, “Surely it’s reviewed at least every year?”

Chiming into the exchange, Sen. Rand Paul wrote, “Nope, Let’s do it.” In 2010, Paul, a frequent critic of the Federal Exchange, questioned whether there was still gold in Fort Knox.

Just checking vs. an official audit

Part of the confusion surrounding the 147.4 million ounces of gold kept at Fort Knox involves distinguishing between a visual inspection of the reserves versus an actual weighing of it. The vaults holding the gold at Fort Knox are not often opened to nonauthorized personnel. In fact, the last time that happened was in 2017, during Trump’s first term, when then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and a Congressional delegation that included Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell toured the facility.

“The gold was there when I visited it,” Mnuchin told CNBC last week. “I hope nobody’s moved it. I’m sure they haven’t. I was the first treasury secretary to go there in I think over 50 years. There’s very serious security protocols in place, obviously, to protect the gold that I can’t talk about.”

In 1975, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican, paid his own visit to look in on the gold at Fort Knox.

“When I went into Fort Knox, you could view the piles of gold,” Grassley told Radio Iowa. “There were separate sections of the vault, and each separate section had a door that was locked, but it had a peephole, maybe six inches square, maybe a foot square, I don’t remember anymore, and you saw the stacks of gold brick there.”

Mnuchin also added that if Trump wants Fort Knox to be audited, “That’s something that can easily be done.” Last week, Paul wrote to Trump’s treasury secretary and asked for just that, requesting in a letter for “an audit of the Mint’s holdings, including testing of the gold.”

In 1974, the last official audit of the gold was conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office and the Department of the Treasury. But due to security measures that keep the public from obtaining too much information about the storage of the gold, audits do little to satisfy conspiracy theorists.

The 1974 audit, for instance, “was intended to quash rumors but provided only temporary relief from public skepticism,” CMI Gold & Silver, one of the oldest gold and silver dealers in the United States, states on its website. “Conspiracy theorists have two basic tenets: one, the gold in Fort Knox is enormously depleted or completely gone; two, some of the gold bars are fake — made out of tungsten with a coating of gold.”

If and when Trump and Musk do travel to Fort Knox, it seems unlikely that the treasury secretary won’t be joining them.

"I don't have any plans to go to Kentucky," Bessent told Bloomberg TV last week. "I can tell the American people on camera right now, there was a report, September 30th, 2024, all the the gold is there. Any U.S. senator who wants to come and visit it can arrange a visit through our office."