Zuckerberg is the most known, liked and disliked tech CEO
Jeff Bezos is the most popular tech chief, while Uber's Travis Kalanick is least favored.
A new survey from Morning Consult shows that Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are, if nothing else, the best-known tech CEOs out there. It also shows the power of statistics to confuse -- at first glance, the survey appears to show that the pair are reasonably well-liked by the public, with 48 and 39 percent favored ratings, respectively. However, Zuck is also the least-favored CEO, while Cook is in third place in that category. So what's the deal? Well, most of the 1,935 voters polled hadn't even heard of the other CEOs in the study, including Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick.
That actually makes the favorable numbers useless unless you compare them to the unfavorable numbers. In that case, Jeff Bezos is actually the best-liked tech CEO, followed by Alphabet's Larry Page, Satya Nadell and Elon Musk. Zuck and Cook are tied for fifth place, ahead of Jack Dorsey and Travis Kalanick, the least popular CEO.
The survey company also asked participants how much they trusted tech companies with their private data and, unsurprisingly, Amazon topped the "confident" list with a 57 percent rating. The public mistrusts Uber as much as it dislikes its CEO, granting it just an 18 percent "confident" rating. Apple, perhaps because of its stand against the FBI, received a 54 percent confident rating, while only 32 percent of users trust Facebook with their data.
The reason that Morning Consult staged this wonky popularity contest was, in part, to show what the public thinks of Tim Cook following his showdown with the FBI.
The reason that Morning Consult staged this wonky popularity contest was, in part, to show what the public thinks of Tim Cook following his showdown with the FBI. It's hard to judge the results, however, without knowing what they thought of him before Apple resisted helping the FBI unlock the phone of terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook. We don't have those stats, but the survey company reports that 51 percent of registered voters believe that Apple should unlock the phone, while 33 percent are opposed (16 percent don't know or care). However, Morning Consult said that "when respondents saw some of Apple's arguments laid out before them, they grew more likely to support the tech giant's position in the debate."
