America’s billionaires woke up Wednesday to a political reckoning — and a Wall Street rally.
As Democrats celebrated a sweeping midterm victory, some of the country’s wealthiest donors traded barbs over record election spending. Others warned the results could threaten the artificial intelligence boom.
Wall Street, however, cheered the outcome. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 1,569 points, or 3%, while the S&P 500 gained 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite rose 1.4%, as investors welcomed political gridlock, reduced uncertainty and President Donald Trump’s willingness to accept the results.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson took aim at the billions spent influencing the election.
“I have felt embarrassed by the billions that tech entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers have spent,” Branson wrote Wednesday on LinkedIn, calling for campaign finance reform. Branson did not give donations that met the threshold reporting in the 2026 election cycle.
His comments came as Elon Musk, the election’s largest individual donor, watched his preferred Republicans lose the Texas Senate and governor races despite pouring $224 million into the state — nearly half his record $474 million in political giving nationwide, according to a CNBC analysis of campaign finance records.
Early Wednesday, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO suggested on X that data centers in space were looking increasingly appealing before joking that his “election-interfering space lasers” had failed.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, another major political donor, took a sharper tone.
“We should get money out of politics,” Hoffman wrote late Tuesday on X, accusing Musk of spending “outrageous amounts to keep authoritarian clowns in power” while defending his own contributions to Democrats.
Other Democratic megadonors celebrated. “The world changed yesterday,” Alex Soros wrote Wednesday on X, hailing the results as a generational victory after his family contributed roughly $103 million to Democratic political efforts.
But beyond the political sparring, some of the country’s richest investors were focused on a potentially bigger consequence of the Democratic sweep: the future of the AI boom.
Even before polls closed Tuesday, Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman warned on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that slowing AI development could jeopardize America’s technological edge. “Practically speaking, we can’t slow down,” he said.
As results rolled in Tuesday night, billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya sounded an even starker warning.
Palihapitiya initially questioned whether the early results would hold, but warned that if they did, the implications for the AI trade could be severe.
“And the only way to sink the AI trade is to sink the data centers,” Palihapitiya said during an election-night livestream of the “All-In” podcast.
Texas offered an early test of those fears. Democratic Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, who has proposed a moratorium on new data-center construction until stronger safeguards are established, defeated three-term Republican incumbent Greg Abbott.
During the same livestream, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner warned the Democratic wave could mean at least 10 to 15 gigawatts of expected AI data-center capacity would not come online in 2027. Wall Street analyst Dan Ives estimated Wednesday that 10% of planned U.S. data centers would no longer go ahead.
AMD CEO Lisa Su acknowledged the growing resistance to AI’s expansion, urging technology companies to demonstrate the benefits of data centers to local communities.
“At the end of the day, what we need to do is ensure that everybody wins from AI,” Su told CNBC Wednesday.
Yet Wall Street may have found opportunity in the same slowdown that worried AI’s biggest backers.
Fewer new data centers could increase the value of existing facilities while easing the enormous spending burden on technology giants. Big Tech stocks surged Wednesday, adding more than $750 billion in market value at one point, even as smaller, debt-dependent data-center operators tumbled.
