Elon Musk spent more on these midterms than any donor in American history, and most of his candidates lost. That’s not the only bad number for him this week. A majority of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the world’s richest man, and it’s not close.
Civiqs, which has tracked opinions of Musk since December 2024, puts him at 37% favorable and 55% unfavorable among registered voters as of Oct. 27, its tracker shows.
How unpopular is Elon Musk now?
- Independents: 34% favorable, 56% unfavorable.
- Young voters, 18 to 34: 26% favorable, 66% unfavorable.
- Women: 29% favorable, 62% unfavorable.
- Black voters: 8% favorable, 87% unfavorable. Hispanic voters: 31% favorable, 61% unfavorable.
- Democrats: 2% favorable. Republicans: still 78% favorable.
This isn’t new. An AP-NORC poll in June 2025 found 57% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Musk, and only about a third had a favorable view of Tesla, compared with about 6 in 10 for Ford and GM.
Why did Americans turn on Musk?
A lot of it is what he posts. In November 2023, he replied “You have said the actual truth” to an antisemitic post on X. The White House called it a “hideous lie,” advertisers left the platform, and Musk later said he had “handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and to those who are antisemitic,” calling the post “very foolish.” In January 2025, he told a rally of Germany’s far-right AfD there was “too much focus on past guilt,” drawing condemnation from Germany’s chancellor, Poland’s prime minister and the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. Bloomberg found his posts about immigration and voting “primarily promote misleading narratives.”
Then came the money. He put at least $445 million into the 2026 midterms, and most of his candidates lost. His response was a joke on X about his “election-interfering space lasers.”
What does it mean for Tesla?
It’s hard to separate politics from a slowing EV market and cheaper Chinese competition. But the gap is hard to miss: in AP-NORC’s 2025 poll, about a third of Americans viewed Tesla favorably, while about 6 in 10 felt that way about Ford and GM. And this week Tesla said it will stop building the Cybertruck in Texas next year, after U.S. sales of the truck fell 48% in 2025.
The BeezLoop Take
Musk likes to say he’s the target of a media campaign. The polling says something simpler: people watched what he posted, what he funded and who he cheered, and made up their own minds. That’s not cancel culture. That’s accountability.
He’s still the richest man alive and still owns the platform. But being rich isn’t the same as being trusted, and this week showed nearly half a billion dollars couldn’t buy that either.
The open question: does Musk pull back from politics before 2028, or double down and keep testing how much his customers will put up with?
Sources: Civiqs · AP-NORC · Views of Elon Musk (Wikipedia, with original sources) · FRANCE 24 (video)
