Elon Musk’s sagging approval ratings could be harming President Donald Trump’s favorability score given the close relationship between the two men, CNN data reporter Harry Enten suggested Tuesday.
On Erin Burnett OutFront, Enten alluded to Musk’s speech over the weekend in support of the far-right German political party AfD. In it, Musk told Germans to “move beyond” any “past guilt” regarding the Holocaust.
Those comments, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz later said, were “really disgusting.”
Musk, who also recently made a gesture many compared to a Sieg Heil salute and which neo-Nazis were thrilled about, “isn’t just pissing off Germans,” Enten said. “He’s pissing off Americans, too.”
While data from 2016 showed Musk with a net-positive rating of 29 points, he was underwater by 3 just before November’s presidential election, and now stands at minus 13, according to Enten.
“He is, at this particular point, not a popular man, neither in Germany and certainly not in the United States,” Enten went on.
“Donald Trump is a more popular guy than Elon Musk is. That’s the bottom line,” he said, indicating Trump is about even.
“If anything, Musk is pulling Trump down—not the other way around,” Enten said of the X CEO whom Trump named to lead DOGE, a government efficiency office.
Musk is “actually potentially someone who can make Trump less well-liked in this country.”
There also appears to be a link between Musk’s approval rating and global deliveries of Teslas, Enten also explained.
While 2022 and 2023 saw jumps of 40 percent and 38 percent, respectively, last year had a loss of 1 percent—“for the first time in a very long time,” Enten said.
“So look, this isn’t helping Elon Musk,” he told Burnett. “There are a lot of things going on in the car business, but this relationship ain’t working for him.”