How popular is Elon Musk?

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

🕒 The latest on Musk’s favorability rating

Updated August 20, 2025

Rest in peace to the America Party, July, 2025 - August, 2025. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk is pulling back on his plans to launch a third party. Why? He wants to focus on his businesses and avoid alienating Republicans. This development is anything but surprising, but it’s another example of Musk’s major step away from politics in the last few months.

Is that going to help his popularity problem? Probably not. But this week, Musk did get two of the best polls he’s seen in awhile. He had a -17 net approval rating in Morning Consult’s weekly poll. And Echelon Insights shows him with a similar approval rating of -18. These are bad results. But they’re less bad than the July polls that had Musk around -25 — and in some cases -30! — net approval. As a result, 33.5 percent of Americans view Musk favorably in our average while 55.8 percent view him unfavorably. That’s the most popular he’s been since mid-July. -EMD, 8/20/25

See also: Donald Trump approval rating dashboard.

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Elon Musk was once fairly popular. But his numbers have inverted as his support for President Trump has increased and particularly since he became a “special government employee” and the de facto head of DOGE. Although Musk may eventually leave the government, he’ll remain an exceptionally important and controversial public figure even if he does. Until then, he could be a liability for Trump because he’s less popular than the president is even as Trump’s numbers have also declined. For our theories about what Musk is hoping to get out of all of this, see here.

Thus, this the landing page for the Silver Bulletin average of 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

Our polling averages are the direct descendant of the polling averages that Nate designed for FiveThirtyEight, and the methodology is largely the same. Click here for more information on how the average works. Silver Bulletin averages weight more reliable polls more heavily. They adjust for house effects. And they account for uncertainty, estimating the fairly wide range where new polls might come in. 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 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.