Who Are America’s Most Popular CEOs?
What do the employees at America’s largest companies think of the leadership?
To answer that, we visualize CEO approval ratings gathered by professional social network Blind.
The results are based on a survey of 13,171 verified professionals in the U.S., conducted between August 18th–23rd, 2023. Respondents were asked if they approve or disapprove of the way their CEO is handling their job.
Top 10 Popular CEOs By Their Employees’ Approval Ratings
By far, the most popular CEO right now (according to Blind’s respondents anyway) is Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, with an astonishing 96% approval rating.
Huang’s numbers point to a theme in the data. Blind notes that there is a correlation between company stock performance and CEO approval rating. Nvidia’s critical role in the artificial intelligence hype train has sent shares up nearly 3x year-on-year. Their financials for the last three quarters show that profit is already up more than four-fold from last year.
Crucially, Huang also avoided layoffs that were otherwise rampant in the tech industry, helping his popularity amongst the staff.
Here are the top 10 most popular CEOs according to Blind’s poll.
| Rank | Company | CEO | Approve (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nvidia | Jensen Huang | 96% |
| 2 | Walmart | Doug McMillon | 88% |
| 3 | Palo Alto Networks | Nikesh Arora | 84% |
| 4 | Apple | Tim Cook | 83% |
| 5 | Databricks | Ali Ghodsi | 83% |
| 6 | Autodesk | Andrew Anagnost | 82% |
| 7 | ServiceNow | Bill McDermott | 81% |
| 8 | Anduril Industries | Brian Schimpf | 79% |
| 9 | AMD | Lisa Su | 79% |
| 10 | Visa | Ryan Mclnerney | 79% |
In fact, the Blind survey uncovered that all of the 10 most popular CEOs, with the exception of Andrew Anag from AutoDesk, did not cut jobs in the last year.
The opposite is true for some of the lowest-rated CEOs.
The Least Popular CEOs By Employee Approval Ratings
Eric Nordstrom (Nordstrom) and David Goeckeler (Western Digital) shared the lowest approval rating possible in the poll: 0%. From Blind’s methodology section, this means not a single surveyed employee answered “strongly approve” or “somewhat approve” to the question.
Both companies cut nearly 200 jobs in 2023, with Nordstrom also responsible for the job losses amongst the company’s wage workers, who staffed the many retail stores the company shuttered.
Here’s the top 10 least popular CEOs according to Blind’s poll.
| Rank | Company | CEO | Approve (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nordstrom | Erik Nordstrom | 0% |
| 2 | Western Digital | David Goeckeler | 0% |
| 3 | Unity Technologies | John Riccitiello | 2% |
| 4 | Illumina | Francis deSouza | 3% |
| 5 | Snap | Evan Spiegel | 3% |
| 6 | Alteryx | Mark Anderson | 3% |
| 7 | X (formerly Twitter) | Linda Yaccarino | 4% |
| 8 | Nextdoor | Sarah Friar | 4% |
| 9 | Compass | Robert Reffkin | 5% |
| 10 | AT&T | John Stankey | 6% |
Also featuring on this list of least-liked CEOs: Evan Spiegel (3%), who reduced Snap’s workforce by a fifth and Linda Yaccarino (4%), who heads X (formerly Twitter) that has been in turmoil since Elon Musk acquired the company in October, 2022.
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