How popular is Elon Musk?

Silver Bulletin favorability ratings for the world's richest man.

🕒 The latest on Musk’s favorability rating

Updated February 18, 2026

Happy Valentine’s Day, Silver Bulletin readers! Two polls released this year show that Americans feel just as negatively toward Elon Musk as they did in late 2025. A Pew Research Center poll from late January showed Musk with a net favorability rating of -20, and a February Economist/YouGov poll had him at a similar -22.

Those results brought Musk’s net favorability rating in our average down to -17.5. That’s right around where he was back in October. Although it’s important to keep in mind that with so few polls about Musk released each month, some volatility is expected even with the extra smoothing we apply. -EMD, 2/14/26

See also: Generic congressional ballot dashboard and Donald Trump approval rating dashboard.

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This the landing page for the Silver Bulletin average of Elon Musk’s favorability polls, tracking him back to the start of 2024.¹ We’ll regularly update this average as new polls come in.²

Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here. Our process for calculating Musk’s favorability ratings is similar to that for calculating President Trump’s approval ratings, although we use slightly more conservative settings as Musk is polled less often than Trump.³

The topline: So, just how popular is Elon Musk?

Our default version of the ratings reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the all-adult version of the poll before the registered voter version.⁴

The polls: What do the surveys say?

You can see all the numbers for each poll that feeds into our average below. You can also click here to download all the Musk favorability numbers — and some additional details not shown in the chart below — for every Musk favorability poll in our database.

This is a free feature, but it requires work to update and maintain. We very much appreciate your support via paid or free subscriptions.

1. If you notice any bugs in the charts or missing polls, just shoot Eli a message and he’ll get them fixed as quickly as possible.

2. We’ll suspend the updates only if Musk so distances himself from politics that pollsters stop regularly asking about him.

3. More specifically, the settings we use for the Musk tracker are similar to the ones we’ve historically used for our generic ballot averages. In addition to not being polled as often, Musk doesn’t make news as often as the president — thus, abrupt changes in favorability ratings are more likely to be noise rather than signal — and there tend to be larger house effects when different firms poll about him. Therefore, the settings use for presidential approval would produce an average that is too “bouncy” if applied to Musk.

4. And we use the registered voter version before the likely voter version.