A decade ago, young adults were flocking to vaunted tech giants like Google and Apple in pursuit of exciting jobs on the cutting edge of tech.
In 2026, however, the status quo of young people who are uncritically enamored with the tech industry and its billionaire overlords has gone completely out the window.
A new survey conducted by CNBC‘s Generation Labs asked over 1,000 US adults aged between 18 and 34 to share their thoughts on politics, AI, and the country’s economy.
A particularly interesting branch of questions polled participants on their views of nine executives overseeing AI companies, and the results were dismal. Asked “who do you trust to act responsibly on AI?” the vast majority of participants said they “don’t trust” any of the nine figures. Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing “don’t trust,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent “trust” score.
Everyone else fell in between: 79 percent of respondents said they don’t trust Peter Thiel, while a whopping 71, 70, and 69 percent said they “don’t trust” Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman, respectively (Musk will probably be mad he didn’t get that 69 figure.)
Those are some appalling approval ratings, reflecting the massive swing in popularity the tech industry has experienced over the last decade, driven by concerns around data privacy, the purposeful decay of once-useful platforms, and the erosion of democracy.
And if all of those tech executives could be embodied by one collective avatar, it would arguably be AI — a technology increasingly reviled by Americans of all ages. Ironically, even AI and the data centers powering it scored better than the tech CEOs in the eyes of the US youth, according to the polling.
Asked what kind of impact AI will have on their lives, 45 percent of respondents said it will have a negative affect on their careers, while an additional 40 percent opined that the US government should regulate AI.
When it comes to data centers, 60 percent said they think the tech industry’s all-out construction drive should slow down. Though the different questions make a direct comparison difficult, it’s noteworthy that even data centers aren’t as unpopular as the tech billionaires underwriting them.
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