Elon Musk may be doing President Donald Trump’s bidding, axing decades-old government agencies, and making drastic cuts to the workforce, but he is still more popular with Americans than Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Historically, Zuckerberg has suffered from low public opinion and trailed significantly behind Musk in approval ratings and public trust in 2023, 2022 and 2021 polls.
But despite the chaos that Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have thrown the federal bureaucracy in, Musk still enjoys public favorability 17 percentage points higher than Zuckerberg, according to Pew Research Center.
Approximately 42 percent of Americans said they have a favorable view of the billionaire-turned-”special government employee” while just 25 percent had the same feelings toward Zuckerberg.
The public’s preference for Musk has been consistent over the last four years.
A 2021 poll from Vox and Data for Progress indicated that 31 percent of Americans felt somewhat or very favorable about Zuckerberg, while 50 percent of Americans felt the same toward Musk.
At that point, Zuckerberg had not testified to Congress about Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation and protecting individual privacy.
More than a year later, a 2022 poll from NBC News found that just 8 percent of the public felt positively toward Zuckerberg, while 31 percent felt positively about Musk.
That poll was conducted after Musk acquired Twitter but before he rebranded the site’s name to X and reinstated controversial figures such as President Donald Trump, Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.
In a 2023 survey of Gen-Z people from YouGov and Business Insider, 23 percent of respondents said they felt Zuckerberg was “somewhat trustworthy,” while 34 percent said they felt Musk was “somewhat trustworthy.”
A majority of respondents to the Pew Research poll have unfavorable views toward both men, but when it comes to how strongly people feel, Musk is a more divisive figure.
About 36 percent of people said they had “very” unfavorable views toward Musk, while 18 percent had “mostly” unfavorable views of him.
Meanwhile, only 26 percent of Americans have “very” unfavorable views of Zuckerberg, while 41 percent have “mostly” unfavorable feelings toward him.
