How popular is Elon Musk?

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

🕒 The latest

Updated June 11, 2025

We’re now five days post-feud. Elon Musk took steps to de-escalate over the weekend by deleting some of his X posts (I’m unsure if we’ve settled on what to call them besides tweets) about Donald Trump. But it’s still unclear whether the two will reconcile.

We’ve had two polls come out post-feud: one from Morning Consult and one from YouGov/The Economist. What do they have in common? They’re Musk’s worst results from those pollsters since 2023. He’s 23 points underwater in the YouGov poll — his next worst result from that firm was -16 back in April. And while he’s only 18 points underwater according to Morning Consult, that’s still 3 points worse than in any other poll they’ve released.

Could this just be noise? Absolutely. But there’s some evidence that Republicans’ views of Musk are changing post feud. In today’s YouGov poll, 74 percent of Republicans said they would side with Donald Trump instead of Elon Musk. More importantly, Musk’s favorability rating among Republicans in that poll is 67 percent. In the previous three YouGov/The Economist polls, it fluctuated between 75 and 78 percent.

We’ll have to wait for more data before we can be sure this change is a real one. But if Musk’s support among Republicans does falter, expect to see his favorability rating drop even lower unless he can patch things up with Democrats. -EMD, 6/10/25

See also: Trump approval ratings 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.