Midterms

The ‘Elon Sell-Off’: Tesla and SpaceX Lose $457 Billion After Musk’s Election Flop

co-produced by AI06. November 2026, 09:49

Elon Musk poured nearly half a billion dollars into the U.S. midterms, and his companies have since lost almost a thousand times that on the stock market: Since Election Day, Tesla and SpaceX have shed a combined $457 billion in market value. In Texas of all places, where both companies have their most important sites, the Republicans Musk backed lost the big races. Afterward, Musk quietly deleted his call to vote for the party.

The Slide in Numbers

Based on Thursday’s closing prices, the two Musk companies lost about $457 billion in two trading days, calculated from the share price declines and the number of shares outstanding. The details:

Tesla: The stock fell from its Election Day close of $398.50 to $343.69 on Thursday, a drop of 13.8 percent. That equals about $216 billion in market value, leaving Tesla worth about $1.36 trillion.
SpaceX: The stock fell from $141.31 to $123.62, down 12.5 percent, or about $240 billion. That puts SpaceX below its $135 I.P.O. price from June. The company is now valued at about $1.68 trillion.
Musk himself: His fortune shrank by about $90 billion in a week to roughly $790 billion, according to Forbes. After the SpaceX I.P.O., it had topped $1 trillion.

For analysts, the cause is clear. “If you had to sum it up in one word: politics,” The Motley Fool writes. Deutsche Bank sees SpaceX “facing some incremental headwinds” in this environment.

Nearly Half a Billion for the Republicans

Musk was by far the biggest donor of the midterms. According to a tally by The New York Times, he had put about $474 million into the campaign by mid-October, mainly through three channels, according to Fast Company:

America PAC: about $216 million to his own political action committee
Senate Leadership Fund: $168 million for Republican Senate races
Congressional Leadership Fund: $30 million for House races

The biggest single chunk went to Texas: $212 million flowed into Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign. It achieved little. According to a Forbes analysis, 44 of the 106 candidates Musk backed lost and 18 won, almost all of them in districts Republicans were expected to hold anyway. Other races were still undecided the day after the election. Any donations through undisclosed channels are not included in the figures.

A Deleted Call to Vote

On Election Day, Musk urged his followers on X: “Vote red today!” By Wednesday morning, the post was gone. According to The New Republic, an earlier pinned post urging votes for Republican Senate candidates was also deleted. Musk offered no explanation. Instead, he wrote on election night that “data centers in space [are] looking pretty appealing right now,” a nod to the threatened freeze on data centers in Texas.

The New Blue Texas

For Musk, Texas is much more than a state. It is home to Tesla’s headquarters and the automaker’s largest U.S. factory, SpaceX’s Starbase launch site and the planned Terafab chip plant. And it is where Democrats have now won the top offices for the first time in decades:

Governor: Gina Hinojosa defeated the incumbent, Greg Abbott. She wants to halt new data centers and has already sued over tax breaks for Musk’s companies, including about $1.7 billion in school tax breaks for Terafab and more than $54 million in state grants for SpaceX. She will also appoint the commission that decides on the sale of Boca Chica State Park, which Musk wants for Starbase.
U.S. Senate: James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton, whose campaign Musk had backed with $212 million.
Attorney general: Nathan Johnson will become the first Democratic attorney general of Texas since 1994. According to The New Republic, he intends to investigate about $110 million in state grants to Starlink.

Then there is Washington. Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, warned on the All-In podcast that Democrats would use their new majority to issue subpoenas “to go after Elon Musk.” SpaceX had booked $6.78 billion in federal contracts through early October alone, including satellites for the Golden Dome missile defense program.

Not Just Musk

The slide cannot be pinned on Musk’s political bet alone, though. The Nasdaq was headed for its worst day in 18 months on Thursday, and other A.I. stocks were hit even harder: AMD and Micron fell as much as 16 percent at one point, and data center operators like CoreWeave and Nebius 15 to 18 percent, as the market tables show. The donations themselves barely register for Musk: According to Fast Company, they amount to about one-fortieth of 1 percent of his fortune. And the new Congress does not convene until January; any effective law against data centers would then also have to get past President Trump’s veto.