Elon Musk’s Net Worth Drops Nearly $80 Billion In A Day As Tesla And SpaceX Stock Crater During Tech Wipe-Out
Quick Read
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Micron and AMD plunged 17% despite strong earnings, as richly priced AI stocks take the worst beating when the data-center boom is questioned.
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Tesla’s 11% drop erased nearly $80 billion of Musk’s paper wealth, while the Nasdaq-100 fund sank 6% and NVIDIA slid 9%.
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Cloud giants’ spending plans decide the outcome: hyperscaler capital spending near $800 billion in 2026 would make this a political scare, while cuts would signal a correction.
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The richest man in the world lost nearly $80 billion in one session Thursday, according to both the Bloomberg and Forbes trackers via TechFlow. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index put Elon Musk’s one-day drop at $79.7 billion, leaving him at about $785 billion. Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list had the drop at $79.3 billion, leaving him at about $789.5 billion.
These are estimates of paper wealth tied to share prices. Musk sold nothing. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) closed down 10.77%, and that drove the loss. He also had a lot of company.
Chipmakers Took the Worst of a Market-Wide Wipe-Out
Each of these funds tracks a major index. From Wednesday’s close to Thursday’s, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:SPY) fell 4.41%. The SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF lost 3.53%, and the Invesco QQQ Trust, which follows the NASDAQ-100, dropped 6.49%. A Financial Times live blog headline said that index had its biggest drop since the pandemic. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF fell 11.21%.
Hardly anyone saw it coming. On Wednesday the CBOE Volatility Index, Wall Street’s fear gauge, closed at 16.61, which sits inside its normal range.
The worst losses landed on AI infrastructure names:
Other AI names fell hard as well: Nebius Group lost 14.94%, Arm 13.08%, Broadcom 10.43%, Intel 10.33%, CoreWeave 9.83% and Palantir 9.73%. All seven Magnificent Seven stocks fell. Apple had the smallest drop at 1.53%, while Meta lost 3.96% and Microsoft 3.58%.
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Why Strong Earnings Didn’t Protect Micron and AMD
Both companies reported strong results. AMD released results on Nov. 3, just two days earlier. Revenue reached $13.38 billion, up 44.7%, and the company forecast fourth-quarter revenue to about $17 billion. Micron forecast next quarter’s gross margin to about 86.25%, and through Thursday the stock was still up 134.76% for the year. Stocks priced for a long data-center boom react hardest when the boom itself comes into question (we featured seven suppliers behind that expansion, from power to cooling to networking, in a free report you can grab here).
The media covering the selloff blamed politics. Forbes said chipmakers and memory stocks were “suffering for a second day after Tuesday’s midterms,” in a selloff “sparked by post-election fears that Democrats will slow the data center buildout.” BigGo reported that Democratic control of Congress and the Texas governorship “raises the prospect of tougher regulation, subpoena-driven investigations and slower review of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger.”
What Index Fund and 401(k) Investors Actually Lost
If you own an S&P 500 or NASDAQ index fund, or a 401(k) heavy in large-cap tech, you took a share of this hit in proportion to your holdings. Those losses remain unrealized until shares are sold.
The selling spread to Asia Thursday evening, U.S. time. AP News reported Japan’s Nikkei fell more than 6% after trading opened. Investing.com reported South Korea’s KOSPI stopped trading after an 8% drop tied to AI losses. Those were early estimates, and the final moves could differ.
Next, keep an eye on whether the big cloud companies change their spending plans. On NVIDIA’s August call, finance chief Colette Kress said capital spending by the top five hyperscalers was expected to reach nearly $800 billion in 2026 and $1.3 trillion in 2027. If those numbers hold, Thursday will look like a political scare. If they get cut, it will look like the start of a correction in AI stocks.
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