Elon Musk's State-By-State Approval Rating
Elon Musk's $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter closed this week. This acquisition re-ignited an ongoing debate about the world's richest man.
Some people praise Musk for his business prowess, having founded PayPal and grown Tesla into the EV powerhouse it is today. In contrast, others find him problematic, referring to his outspoken nature, and run-ins with the SEC.
Now the dust has settled from his initial Twitter takeover news, we’ve undertaken a new study reviewing over 78,000 tweets from the last 12 months discussing Mr. Musk. These tweets were then put through sentiment analysis tools to work out whether each user likes or dislikes him. We have also collected search data from Google, to see which US states Musk has the most people interested in him.
Read below for the full study analyzing Elon Musk's "approval rating" by state.
Key findings:
- In terms of Elon's overall approval rating, America feels more negative (38.2%) than positive (19.2%) toward Elon Musk.
- Hawaiians like Elon Musk more than any state, with the highest proportion of positive tweets toward the tech entrepreneur (272 per 1,000 posts).
- Residents of Delaware are the most likely to feel negatively toward Musk, with 465 tweets per 1,000 expressing their dislike, closely followed by Maine (448)
- Massachusetts residents are the most interested in Elon Musk, with a monthly search volume of 1,069 per 100,000 residents Googling information about him.
- In contrast, the people of Georgia have little interest toward Musk, with only 60 per 100,000 citizens searching for him on Google every month.
American's Sentiment On Elon Musk is Mixed
From our analysis of over 78,000 recent tweets, America generally does not feel particularly positive about Elon Musk.
Overall, 38.2% of posts about Elon Musk are negative. And only 19.2% are positive toward the tech entrepreneur.
However, a large number of tweets (42.6%) are neutral.
Let’s see how this breaks down across the nation.
Which States Like Elon Musk?
Hawaii tweet their love for Elon Musk the most, with 272 positive tweets for every 1,000 posted. This is possibly influenced by Space X’s Starlink partnership with Hawaiian Airlines in April 2022.
After the Aloha State, Alaska had the second-most positive tweets (252), followed by Idaho (238). The top ten states that like Elon Musk the most can be seen in the following map:
Which States Dislike Elon Musk?
Delaware residents tend to tweet more about their dislike toward Musk, at around 465 tweets per 1,000, closely followed by Maine (448) and Oregon (443). See the map where Elon has the most haters below:
Which States Show the Most Interest In Elon Musk?
We also reviewed how many people searched for info on Elon Musk each month. Proportional to the state's population, Massachusetts is the most interested in Elon Musk, with 1,069 Google searches made per 100,000 people in the state, the highest in the country. The state of Georgia showed the least interest with only 60 searches made per 100,000 residents.
| State | Searches per 100k Residents |
| Massachusetts | 1069 |
| New York | 1046 |
| New Jersey | 1020 |
| Washington | 938 |
| Connecticut | 933 |
| California | 928 |
| Florida | 906 |
| Illinois | 879 |
| New Hampshire | 878 |
| Hawaii | 863 |
| Pennsylvania | 859 |
| Virginia | 857 |
| Nevada | 837 |
| Colorado | 830 |
| Texas | 817 |
| Maryland | 815 |
| Utah | 806 |
| Arizona | 792 |
| Ohio | 772 |
| Oregon | 765 |
| Rhode Island | 762 |
| Michigan | 740 |
| Maine | 728 |
| Tennessee | 707 |
| Vermont | 706 |
| Minnesota | 706 |
| North Dakota | 698 |
| Wisconsin | 690 |
| North Carolina | 685 |
| Alabama | 669 |
| Delaware | 661 |
| Missouri | 655 |
| Idaho | 638 |
| Kansas | 620 |
| South Carolina | 620 |
| Nebraska | 617 |
| Alaska | 610 |
| Kentucky | 604 |
| Montana | 604 |
| Arkansas | 595 |
| Indiana | 592 |
| Louisiana | 587 |
| New Mexico | 574 |
| Iowa | 570 |
| West Virginia | 564 |
| Oklahoma | 554 |
| Mississippi | 500 |
| Wyoming | 498 |
| South Dakota | 488 |
| Georgia | 60 |
What Do Men and Women Think of Elon Musk?
Our study also analyzed how the perception of Elon Musk differs by gender. Where possible we reviewed the difference between men and women and what they say and feel about the tech entrepreneur.
Women were only marginally more likely to tweet more negatively about Elon Musk, with 39.2% of their tweets being negative, compared to 38.1% in men. However, women were also slightly more likely to tweet more positively about Musk (19.3% vs 18.9%).
Overall, men and women seem to like and dislike the tech entrepreneur an almost equal amount. Indicating that his online fans and critics appear not to be influenced by gender.
Methodology and sources
We took a dataset of 78,081 tweets from Twitter of posts that discussed “Elon Musk” or replied to the @elonmusk account. The exact search terms used for this analysis can be found below. These tweets were than analyzed using a roBERTa-base sentiment analysis tool, created by a Cardiff University’s ‘Research Group in Natural Language Processing’
Tweets were only reviewed if they contained geolocation data placing the user in the U.S.
The Genderize API was used to determine a probability of gender for each Twitter account where this was not stated on their profile. Those accounts where gender was unable to be determined by the algorithm were discounted from the analysis. Those who identify as non-binary were considered based on their Twitter bios (they/them pronouns) but did not make up a large enough proportion of the dataset to compare in this study.
Google search data came directly from Google (Google Ads: Keyword Planner) which supplied the monthly search volume for the term ‘elon musk’ in each state. This data was taken on the 29th June 2022. The monthly search volume from Google was compared to the population of each state, from World Population Review, to get an approximate figure for searches per 100,000 people.
