America’s billionaires woke up Wednesday to a political reckoning and a Wall Street rally.
As Democrats celebrated big midterm election victories, some of the nation’s wealthiest donors went on a rant over record campaign spending. Some warned that the results could threaten the artificial intelligence boom.
However, Wall Street welcomed the result. of Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 1,569 points (3%). S&P500 1.6% increase; Nasdaq Composite The index rose 1.4% as investors welcomed the political impasse, reducing uncertainty and President Donald Trump’s willingness to accept the outcome.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson has taken aim at the billions of dollars spent to influence elections.
“I am ashamed of the billions of dollars spent by tech entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers,” Branson wrote on LinkedIn Wednesday, calling for campaign finance reform. Mr. Brunson did not make any contributions that meet the reporting criteria for the 2026 election cycle.
His comments come as Elon Musk, the campaign’s biggest individual donor, watched his preferred Republican Party lose the Texas Senate and governor’s races despite pumping $224 million into the state, according to a CNBC analysis of campaign finance records.
early Wednesday morning, tesla and space x The CEO joked on X that his “space laser to interfere with elections” had failed, after suggesting that data centers in space were becoming increasingly attractive.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, another major political donor, was more pointed.
“We need to get the money out of politics,” Hoffman wrote in X late Tuesday, accusing Musk of spending “exorbitant amounts of money to keep authoritarian clowns in power” while defending his contributions to the Democratic Party.
Other Democratic big donors also celebrated. “The world changed yesterday,” Alex Soros wrote on X on Wednesday, hailing the outcome as a generational victory after his family donated about $103 million to Democratic political campaigns.
But beyond the political divide, some of the country’s wealthiest investors were focused on a potentially bigger consequence of a Democratic landslide victory: the future of the AI boom.
Even before voting closed on Tuesday, Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman warned on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that delays in AI development could jeopardize America’s technological advantage. “Realistically speaking, we can’t slow down,” he said.
After the results were announced on Tuesday night, billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya issued an even starker warning.
Palihapitiya initially questioned whether the early results would hold up, but warned that if they did, the impact on AI trade could be severe.
“The only way to sink the AI trade is to sink the data centers,” Palihapitiya said on the election night livestream of the “All In” podcast.
Texas provided an early test of these concerns. Democratic Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, who proposed a moratorium on new data center construction until stronger safeguards are in place, defeated three-term Republican incumbent Greg Abbott.
During the same livestream, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner warned that the Democratic wave could keep at least 10 to 15 gigawatts of expected AI data center capacity from coming online in 2027. Wall Street analyst Dan Ives predicted Wednesday that 10% of planned data centers in the U.S. will not be built.
AMD CEO Lisa Su acknowledged the growing resistance to expanding AI and urged technology companies to demonstrate the benefits of data centers to local communities.
“At the end of the day, what we have to do is make sure everyone wins from AI,” Hsu told CNBC on Wednesday.
But Wall Street may have seen an opportunity in the same economic slowdown that worried AI’s biggest backers.
Fewer new data centers could increase the value of existing facilities while easing huge spending burdens on tech giants. Big Tech stocks soared on Wednesday, even as smaller, debt-dependent data center operators fell, at one point adding more than $750 billion in market value.
