(Credit: Julia Demaree Nikhinson - Pool/Getty Images)
It may seem that nothing can unite Americans in these turbulent times, but a new poll finds a large and bipartisan majority of people agreeing on one thing: Zuck sucks.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s approval ratings in a Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday are not just underwater but under an oil rig on fire: 67% of poll respondents view the billionaire unfavorably, with just 25% report favorable views.
That fraction of favorable views is lower than the share of people reporting “very unfavorable” views of Zuckerberg at 26%. Only 2% attested “very favorable” views.
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents frowned only a little less on Zuckerberg, with 60% holding unfavorable views and 34% favorable. Democrats, however, looked more ready to smash the “unfriend” button, with 76% of them seeing Zuck unfavorably and 17% favorably.
Zuckerberg might have hoped to come off better with the GOP after a recent and public pivot to supporting President Trump. Among his overtures to the new administration, under which the Federal Trade Commission continues to lead a multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Meta that is now set to go to trial in April, he has:
- Accused the Biden administration of trying to censor content (the Supreme Court found no such thing happened in an opinion last June).
- Ended fact-checking efforts.
- Allowed previously banned slurs against gay and transgender people.
- Dumped diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
- Paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump brought against the company for banning him after his role in instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.
Previous and nonpartisan gripes with Meta’s platforms—such as automated content-moderation machinery running amok across all of them, AI slop overrunning Facebook, the incessant and increasingly intrusive advertising, weird “AI personas” on Instagram, and so on—may not have helped Zuckerberg’s cause.
(None of this poses any threat to Zuckerberg’s job; his title might as well be CEO for Life, given his ownership of the majority of voting shares at the company.)
Meanwhile, an even-wealthier billionaire who has gone far more MAGA than Zuckerberg—to the extent of exploiting his ownership of X to promote Trump’s campaign, spending a small fraction of his fortune to help get Trump elected, and then taking on an unprecedented role in Trump’s White House as a sort of shadow president with sweeping access to people’s data—gets a different reception among Pew respondents.
Elon Musk’s favorables are also in the red overall, with 54% seeing him unfavorably (36% very much so) and 42% favorably (11% very), but Republicans and GOP-leaning independents are vastly more positive about him: 73% report favorable views and just 24% have unfavorable views.
Among Democrats and Dem-leaning independents, that ratio turned toxic, with 85% holding unfavorable views and 12% with favorable ones.
Musk’s roles at his portfolio of companies—X, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company—seems every bit as secure as Zuckerberg’s reign. But while SpaceX remains critical to NASA (thanks in part to Boeing’s ineptitude at developing crewed spacecraft and Blue Origin’s slow start), Tesla no longer has a lane to itself in the electric-vehicle market. US sales slumped in 2024, and January sales data in Europe showed them falling off a cliff, including a 63% plunge in France.
And as Musk’s chaotic rule of X has seen that platform change useful features like the block function. That platform also faces increasing competition from alternative short-form social platforms. Among them, Meta’s Threads got off to a fast start but has since faced pushback from people objecting to Zuckerberg’s MAGA makeover. The decentralized Bluesky, after a more leisurely launch, is now nearing 32 million users. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are apparently not among them, a fact many Bluesky users might see as not a bug but a feature.