America’s billionaires woke up Wednesday to a political reckoning — and a rally on Wall Street.
As Democrats celebrated a landslide victory in the midterms, some of the nation’s wealthiest donors traded barbs over record campaign spending. Others warned that the findings could threaten the artificial intelligence boom.
Wall Street, however, welcomed the result. THE Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 1,569 points, or 3%, while the S&P500 gained 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite rose 1.4% as investors welcomed political impasse, reduced uncertainty and President Donald Trump’s willingness to accept the results.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson took aim at billions spent to influence elections.
“I felt embarrassed by the billions spent by tech entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers,” Branson wrote Wednesday on LinkedIn, calling for campaign finance reform. Branson has not made any donations above the reporting threshold in the 2026 election cycle.
His comments come as Elon Musk, the election’s largest individual donor, saw his favored Republicans lose Texas Senate and gubernatorial races despite investing $224 million in the state, nearly half of his record $474 million in political donations nationwide, according to a CNBC analysis of campaign finance records.
Early Wednesday, the Tesla And EspaceX The CEO suggested on X that data centers in space looked increasingly attractive before joking that his “election-interfering space lasers” had broken down.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, another major political donor, took a firmer tone.
“We should get money out of politics,” Hoffman wrote Tuesday night on X, accusing Musk of spending “outrageous amounts of money to keep authoritarian clowns in power” while defending his own contributions to Democrats.
Other Democratic megadonors celebrated. “The world changed yesterday,” Alex Soros wrote on X on Wednesday, hailing the results as a generational victory after his family contributed about $103 million to Democratic political efforts.
But beyond political wrangling, some of the nation’s wealthiest investors were focused on a potentially more important consequence of the Democratic victory: 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 lead. “In practice, we can’t slow down,” he said.
As the results came in Tuesday evening, billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya issued an even harsher warning.
Palihapitiya initially questioned whether the initial results would be valid, but warned that if they did, the implications for AI business could be serious.
“And the only way to sink the AI business is to sink the data centers,” Palihapitiya said during a live broadcast of the “All-In” podcast on election night.
Texas offered an early test of those fears. Democratic Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, who proposed a moratorium on the construction of new data centers until stronger safeguards are established, defeated three-term Republican incumbent Greg Abbott.
During the same livestream, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner warned that the Democratic wave could mean that at least 10 to 15 gigawatts of planned AI data center capacity will not come online in 2027. Wall Street analyst Dan Ives estimated Wednesday that 10% of planned U.S. data centers will no longer come online.
AMD CEO Lisa Su acknowledged growing resistance to AI expansion, urging tech companies to demonstrate the benefits of data centers to local communities.
“Ultimately, what we need to do is ensure that everyone benefits from AI,” Su told CNBC on Wednesday.
Yet Wall Street may have found opportunity in the same downturn that worried AI’s biggest backers.
Fewer new data centers could increase the value of existing facilities while easing the huge spending burden on tech giants. Shares of big tech companies surged Wednesday, adding more than $750 billion in market value at one point, even as smaller, debt-dependent data center operators fell.
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