Elon Musk asks Americans to vote on major change to daily lives of every single person in the US

Elon Musk has asked Americans to vote on whether they’d like clocks to be permanently put forwards or backwards if daylight savings was abolished.

The billionaire First Buddy has advocated for ‘canceling’ daylight savings across the nation for months, on the back of a Trump campaign pledge to roll back the clock changes.

On Wednesday Musk shared a poll on X, asking participants: ‘If daylight savings time change is canceled, do you prefer an hour earlier [or] an hour later.’

As of early Thursday, more than 1.1million people have responded to his poll in just 13 hours. 

About 58 per cent of participants said they would prefer the clocks being pushed forward by an hour, meaning it would be brighter in the evening.

Clocks will jump forward an hour on Sunday as daylight savings begins, signaling the end of winter and early sunsets. 

Musk’s post sparked heated debate among advocates for both options. 

‘Keep it an hour later—more sunlight in the evening means more productivity, outdoor time, and a natural energy boost. Who really wants it getting dark at 4 PM,’ one said.

But another person hit back to note: ‘Standard Time. You can’t cut off the bottom of a blanket and sew it to the top and make a longer blanket.’

Back in November, Musk said it ‘looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes’, sparking an instant response from Trump’s eldest son Don Jr.

‘100 per cent,’ he wrote, using emojis. ‘Leave it daylight savings time always.’

His former partner at the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, agreed, adding: ‘It’s inefficient & easy to change.’

While Musk has already made his mark on government through his sweeping changes to departments and ability to purge bloated agencies, a change to daylight savings would be his most far-reaching decision yet, impacting the lives of every single American.

Some states have been fighting to do away with the practice even before Trump weighed in on the annual event late last year.

‘The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!’ Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in December.

‘Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.’

Arizona and Hawaii are the only states to observe standard time all year-round.

Hawaii has never observed Daylight Saving Time, while Arizona stopped doing so in 1968.

The US Senate passed a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent in 2022, but it failed to pass in the House.

‘[T]his past weekend, we all went through that biannual ritual of changing the clock back and forth, and the disruption that comes with it,’ Senator Marco Rubio said at the time.

‘And one has to ask themselves after a while, “Why do we keep doing it? Why are we doing this?”‘

Rubio, now Secretary of State, has been another outspoken advocate for abolishing the change. 

Legislation impacting Daylight Saving Time is currently being considered in multiple states, according to Fortune.

The states pushing for permanent Daylight Saving Time are Maine, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Illinois and Iowa.

Nearly two dozen other states – including California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania – have proposed making standard time permanent. 

The nation observed permanent daylight time in 1974-1975. That happened during the oil crisis. 

According to a New York Times account at the time it was repealed, ‘parents became concerned about traffic accidents involving their children, who were going to school in the predawn darkness on winter mornings,’ although a Transportation Department study didn’t provide a clear picture on any increase.