Survey: The Most Disliked (and Liked) CEOs in Tech

Blind.com, a site where employees can discuss issues anonymously, surveyed more than 13,100 U.S. workers on their views of their CEO. The question posed to them was this: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way your CEO is handling their job?"

Among the top 10 CEOs most beloved by employees, share price performance made an impact as did job security - several did not do any layoffs in the past year or longer. Some of the worst-rated CEOs, on the other hand, did fire people this year.

What may be surprising is that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi landed on the top 15 most liked list, despite the ouster of co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick in part for allegedly ignoring sexual harassment complaints at the company. Also another eye-opener: On the most disliked list is Linda Yaccarino, new CEO of X, who was hired to fix strained relations with advertisers in the aftermath of Elon Musk's policy and personnel changes at Twitter.

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The darling of tech employees is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, where 96% of his employees in the survey gave him a thumbs up. It does not hurt that Nvidia's stock has been on a tear this year. "He saw this AI mania coming 10+ years ago," one employee said. "I trust him completely."

Among Big Tech, most had higher disapproval ratings than approval. Most of them had layoffs in the last 12 months.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a 49% disapproval rating while 45% approved of him; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had a disapproval rating of 63% and approval of 30%; Google CEO Sundar Pichai had a 66% disapproval rating and 26% approval rating; Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had an 86% disapproval rating and 10% approval rating.

The list included CEOs from many industries, but AI Business only considered tech companies. As a comparison, President Biden had a 41% approval rating in September, according to Gallup.

Most liked CEOS and their approval ratings:

Most disliked CEOs and their disapproval ratings: