Most Americans are not big fans of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s two richest men, according to new survey data from Pew Research Center.
The majority of respondents (54%) said they had an unfavorable view of Musk, including 36% saying they had a “very” unfavorable opinion of him. Musk — who owns X and is the boss of Tesla and SpaceX, among other companies — received a “favorable” vote from 42% of respondents.
It is worth noting that Musk’s favorability differs wildly across party lines. Among respondents who said they leaned towards Democrats and left-leaning candidates, 85% of them said they disliked Musk; 73% of Republicans, on the other hand, had a favorable view of him.
That does not come as much of a shock, considering Musk spent at least $250 million to help President Trump and other Republicans win elections last November. And Musk has been a key cog in Trump’s second administration, where he is spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE; Musk said last week he is aiming to trim at least $1 trillion in annual spending from the federal bureaucracy.
The Meta CEO, meanwhile, is even more disliked than Musk, with 67% of Americans saying they have an unfavorable view of Zuckerberg. That distaste is shared among Democrats and Republicans, with 76% of left-leaning respondents saying they have an unfavorable view of Zuckerberg, and 60% of right-leaning respondents saying the same thing.
Zuckerberg has had a notoriously up-and-down relationship with President Trump, whom he banned from Instagram and Facebook in early 2021, following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. At the time, Zuckerberg said “the risks” of keeping him on the platforms were “simply too great.” Trump was later reinstated to those platforms in 2023.
More recently, Zuckerberg has had a better rapport with the president. He donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and he was there in Washington, D.C. last month, alongside Musk and other tech executives like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google chief Sundar Pichai. Despite that, most Trump fans in D.C. told TheWrap they remained skeptical of Zuckerberg’s sudden embrace of President Trump.
Zuckerberg, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Tracker, has a net worth of $241 billion, making him the second richest person in the world. His net worth has received a nice boost recently, thanks to Meta’s stock price jumping 20% since early November. Musk, despite a recent decline for Tesla’s stock price, remains the world’s richest person with a net worth of $385 billion.
Pew’s survey was conducted between Jan. 27 and Feb. 2 and included 5,086 respondents.
