WASHINGTON – Elon Musk spent years building cachet as a business titan and tech visionary, brushing aside critics and skeptics to become the richest person on the planet.
But as Musk gained power in Washington in recent months, his popularity has waned, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
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Just 33% of U.S. adults have a favorable view of Musk, the chain-saw-wielding, late-night-posting, campaign-hat-wearing public face of President Donald Trump’s efforts to downsize and overhaul the federal government. That share is down from 41% in December.
“It was a shame that he crashed and burned his reputation,” said Ernest Pereira, 27, a Democrat who works as a lab technician in North Carolina. “He bought into his own hype.”
The poll found that about two-thirds of adults believe Musk has held too much influence over the federal government during the past few months — although that influence may be coming to an end. The billionaire entrepreneur is expected to leave his administration job in the coming weeks.
Musk is noticeably less popular than the overall effort to pare back the government workforce, which Trump has described as bloated and corrupt. About half of U.S. adults believe the Republican president has gone too far on reducing the size of the federal workforce, while roughly 3 in 10 think he is on target and 14% want him to go even further.
Retiree Susan Wolf, 75, of Pennsylvania, believes the federal government is too big but Musk has “made a mess of everything.”
“I don’t trust him,” she said. “I don’t think he knows what he’s doing.”
Wolf, who is not registered with a political party, said Musk’s private sector success does not translate to Washington.
“He thinks you run a government like you run a business. And you don’t do that,” she said. “One is for the benefit of the people, and the other is for the benefit of the corporation.”
Much of the downsizing has been done through so-called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which was Musk’s brainchild during last year’s campaign. Thousands of federal employees have been fired or pushed to quit, contracts have been canceled and entire agencies have been brought to a standstill.
Musk has succeeded in providing a dose of shock therapy to the federal government, but he has fallen short of other goals. After talking about cutting spending by $1 trillion, he has set a much lower target of $150 billion. Even reaching that amount could prove challenging, and DOGE has regularly overstated its progress.
He is expected to start dedicating more time to Tesla, his electric automaker that has suffered plummeting revenue while he was working for Trump. Musk told investors on a recent conference call that “now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is done,” he expects to spend just “a day or two per week on government matters.”
Musk, in his work for the administration, has continued a political evolution toward the right. Although the South African-born entrepreneur was never easy to categorize ideologically, he championed the fight against climate change and often supported Democratic candidates.
Now he criticizes “the woke mind virus” and warns of the collapse of Western civilization from the threats of illegal migration and excess government spending.
Musk’s increasingly conservative politics are reflected in the polling. Only about 2 in 10 independents and about 1 in 10 Democrats view Musk favorably, compared with about 7 in 10 Republicans.
In addition, while about 7 in 10 independents and about 9 in 10 Democrats believe Musk has too much influence, only about 4 in 10 Republicans feel that way.
Mark Collins, 67, a warehouse manager from Michigan who has leaned Republican in recent years, said Musk “runs a nice, tight ship” at his companies, “and the government definitely needs tightening up.”
“He’s cleaning up all the trash,” he said. “I love what he’s doing.”
Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to be worried about being affected by recent cuts to federal government agencies, services or grants. Just 11% said they are “extremely” or “very” concerned that they or someone they know will be affected, while about two-thirds of Democrats and 44% of independents have those fears.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,260 adults was conducted April 17-21, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.