Wall Street had a historic moment the day after Democrats swept the midterms, with the Dow rising 3% on Wednesday, its best performance after a midterm in 44 years. But on Thursday, it erased those gains, dropping 2.9% as investors dumped AI-related stocks like AMD and Micron.
But for Elon Musk, who spent an estimated $427.5 million to $483 million on backing Republicans, the losses started on the same day as the rally, and then accelerated. Tesla shares fell by 3.3% and SpaceX shares fell by 3.8% on Wednesday’s market close, erasing tens of billions from Musk’s fortune as they also underperformed against the S&P 500’s 1.6% growth and stocks like Amazon and Apple, which jumped 6.1% and 5.3%, per Fortune’s analysis. He lost $33.5 billion of his paper wealth that day, and another $79.7 billion in Thursday’s selloff, bringing his two-day loss to about $113 billion as of market close on Nov. 5, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In short, in 48 hours, Tesla and SpaceX went from having a combined market cap of about $3.5 trillion on Tuesday night, to a combined $3.04 trillion on Thursday night, wiping out about $456 billion in total. As of Thursday night, SpaceX’s market cap is $1.68 trillion, about 87% of what it was on midterms night, and Tesla’s market cap is $1.36 trillion, about 86% of its value from then.
Investors are worried the two companies and their founder will face increased scrutiny from the new Congress. Democrats have signaled they want to investigate Musk’s involvement with DOGE gutting federal agencies and his potential conflicts of interests, since SpaceX has earned billions from federal contracts. The incoming House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Robert Garcia has vowed to investigate “corporate corruption,” and his spokesperson told Politico on Oct. 20 that Musk’s role in DOGE “is something we plan to investigate.”
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered first, and Musk has certainly stuck out, especially in government, whether it be donations, the election, and any of the feathers he ruffled while he was at DOGE,” Keith Snyder, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, told Fortune.
The scrutiny could extend to SpaceX’s satellite business, its most consistently profitable segment. Sen. Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut sent a letter to Musk asking about SpaceX’s contracts with the Department of Defense and its ability to restrict Starlink after reports circulated that Ukraine’s military lost access to Starlink without notice.
But Snyder said the brief SpaceX and Tesla selloff was investors having a “knee-jerk reaction” to the election and overestimating the impact Democrats can have on the companies. After all, President Donald Trump still has veto power over any major AI restrictions they can pass, and is still friendly toward Musk.
“Reigning in AI has been a stated goal of theirs, but you have to remember Trump seems to still be backing Musk and has veto power,” Snyder said.
For investors hanging their hopes on a SpaceX and Tesla merger and worried about Democrats’ interference there, Snyder said that because the Federal Communications Commission has a Republican majority, he doesn’t expect major actions there except Democrats’ power to “dramatically slow things down.” Fortune has reported that the merger math doesn’t add up for SpaceX shareholders.
“There’s too many pieces that are already in place for Musk, for Tesla, for SpaceX that will allow him to continue without having to worry about any kind of Democratic action,” he said.
Some analysts take a more bearish stance. Dan Ives wrote in a note on Thursday that a Tesla SpaceX merger “faces a much tougher regulatory roadmap” because of Texas turning blue. This new political reality partially made possible by voters angry over data centers coincides with investors’ long-running concerns about the AI buildout being unsustainable. Snyder said that anxiety could’ve contributed to the SpaceX selloff, but that SpaceX has an advantage in already having broken ground on data centers.
On its Q3 earnings call before the midterms, Musk said he was confident the company can bring 10 gigawatts of compute online by 2027 on top of the 2.5 to 3 gigawatts SpaceX will have by the end of 2026, a total number that AI and semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis quantified as equivalent to all of Google’s data center capacity from 1999 to 2026 in just one and a half years.
“Even if they’re able to achieve 25% to 50% of that goal, that would be incredible in terms of capacity build out,” Snyder said.
He said where he sees more risk for SpaceX and for AI in general is if there’s a Democrat win in the White House in two years, since for now there will be a political gridlock with a Republican president and a Democrat-controlled Congress.
“The fears to these AI companies are real now,” he said. “[Democrats’] agenda has clearly stated they want to rein in AI, and so, ‘27, ‘28 is gonna be a stalemate, but it then becomes what happens in ‘29.”
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