What the episode does show is how quickly political risk can be transmitted to the companies at the centre of the AI boom.
The combined net worth of Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has fallen by $104.9 billion amid a stock market downturn following the Democrats' win in the US midterm elections, Bloomberg has reported, according to TASS. Musk bore the largest losses, with his fortune dropping by $79.7 billion. Huang's net worth fell by $15.1 billion to $150.9 billion, pushing him from ninth to thirteenth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, while Ellison lost $10.1 billion.
The reported trigger was political rather than corporate. According to the agency, expectations that a Democrat-controlled House and Senate will work to limit the construction of data centres — a critical component of AI infrastructure — helped drive shares of semiconductor makers and suppliers of computing power lower. Nvidia plunged 9.3 per cent, its steepest decline since January 2025, while SpaceX fell 9 per cent and Oracle dropped 6.9 per cent.
The scale of the paper losses reflects how much of the current market valuation of American technology rests on the assumption of uninterrupted expansion of computing capacity. Data centres sit at the base of that assumption: they are the physical plant on which AI models are trained and run, and the demand they generate has underpinned the earnings of chipmakers and cloud providers alike. If investors now price in political constraints on building them, the effect runs well beyond three personal fortunes.
The electoral picture itself is not yet final. Midterm elections were held on 3 November, with Americans voting for 35 of 100 senators and all 435 members of the House of Representatives, alongside gubernatorial elections in 36 states. According to the latest estimates from US media, the Democrats are poised to win a majority in both houses; Republicans currently hold both. Those estimates are projections rather than certified results, and the precise scale of any Democratic majority is not established in the report.
Nor is it confirmed what a Democratic Congress would actually do. The report describes market expectations of efforts to limit data centre construction, not legislation that has been drafted, voted on or promised in detail. Whether such limits would take the form of planning restrictions, energy rules, subsidy conditions or something else is not stated. The link between the election outcome and the sell-off rests on Bloomberg's account of investor reasoning, and the moves in individual shares are reported figures that have not been independently verified here.
What the episode does show is how quickly political risk can be transmitted to the companies at the centre of the AI boom. A shift in control of Congress has been read by investors as a potential constraint on the industry's most basic input, and the market has repriced accordingly. The fortunes of Huang, Musk and Ellison are the most visible measure of that repricing, but the underlying question — how far a new Congress will go in shaping where and whether data centres are built — remains unanswered.
