Elon Musk Lost About $113 Billion in Two Days as Tesla and SpaceX Shares Fell After the Midterms
Two outlets put numbers on Elon Musk’s bad week, and they do not measure the same thing. Fortune, citing the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, reported a loss of about $113 billion over two days. Forbes counted about $80 billion for a single day, Thursday, Nov. 5, the second session after the midterm elections.
Both are paper figures that rise and fall with share prices. Musk sold nothing, according to 24/7 Wall St., which tracked the same drop.
How the $113 billion adds up
The two-day total comes from Fortune’s report on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. By Bloomberg’s count, Musk lost about $33.5 billion on Wednesday, Nov. 4, the day after the midterms, and about $79.7 billion on Thursday, Nov. 5. Together that is roughly $113 billion.
The one-day number is Forbes’ Nov. 5 account. It put the drop at about $80 billion, or more than 9%, which left his net worth below $800 billion. Forbes noted that he had regained trillionaire status less than a month earlier.
The 24/7 Wall St. write-up lines the two trackers up side by side. It lists a $79.7 billion drop on the Bloomberg index, leaving him near $785 billion, and a $79.3 billion drop on Forbes’ real-time list, leaving him near $789.5 billion. The gap between trackers is small, and each uses its own method for valuing his stakes.
What happened to Tesla and SpaceX shares
Forbes reported that Tesla shares fell 11.5% on Thursday to their lowest level since August, and that SpaceX shares fell 8% to about $125 each. The 24/7 Wall St. article puts Tesla’s close that day at a decline of 10.77%, which it says drove most of the loss.
The day before, Fortune said, Tesla fell 3.3% and SpaceX fell 3.8%, even as the S&P 500 rose 1.6%. Fortune put the combined market value of the two companies at about $3.5 trillion on midterm night and $3.04 trillion by Thursday night, a loss of about $456 billion, a figure it attributed to CNBC.
Musk’s own earlier comments help explain why his fortune moves by so much. Forbes quoted him saying in August: “A bunch of it only vests on extremely crazy good outcomes for SpaceX, so actual full vested percentage is lower.” The Forbes profile page lists his stakes in SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and Neuralink, with SpaceX holding most of the value.
The selloff behind the numbers
Musk was not alone. Forbes said Michael Dell lost $18.6 billion on Nov. 5, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang about $15 billion, Oracle’s Larry Ellison $11.3 billion and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg $9.4 billion. It added that President Trump had lost more than $200 million since Election Day as Trump Media & Technology Group shares fell more than 11%.
According to 24/7 Wall St., the Invesco QQQ fund tracking the Nasdaq-100 fell 6.49% from Wednesday’s close to Thursday’s, and a semiconductor fund dropped 11.21%. Micron fell 17.46%, AMD 17.26% and Nvidia 9.26%.
Forbes tied the slump to investor doubts that heavy artificial intelligence spending will pay off. It cited a Goldman Sachs projection that Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta will spend about $800 billion on AI this year, and said the Democratic sweep of Congress raised the prospect of investigations into large technology companies.
Why Musk drew the sharpest reaction
Fortune laid out the political case. It reported that Democrats want to examine Musk’s role in federal spending cuts and his possible conflicts of interest, since SpaceX has earned billions from federal contracts. It quoted a spokesperson for incoming House Oversight chair Rep. Robert Garcia telling Politico on Oct. 20 that the committee plans to investigate Musk’s government role.
Fortune also cited analyst Dan Ives, who said a Tesla-SpaceX merger “faces a much tougher regulatory roadmap.” A Tesla investor relations page shows the company reported third-quarter results on Oct. 21, before the election.
Keith Snyder of CFRA called the selloff “knee-jerk” and an overreaction, according to Fortune. He said Musk “has certainly stuck out,” and pointed out that President Trump still holds veto power over major AI restrictions and that the FCC’s Republican majority limits regulatory risk. Snyder expects gridlock in 2027 and 2028, with a Republican president and a Democratic Congress.
A partial rebound by Friday
The losses did not stand still. As of Nov. 6, the Forbes profile showed Musk’s net worth at about $852.3 billion, up $62.8 billion, or 7.96%, from the prior trading day, and still first in the world. That puts him well above the sub-$800 billion level Forbes reported on Thursday.
Nothing in either tracker reflects a sale of stock or a transfer of cash. The rebound is as much a share-price estimate as the drop was. Both trackers recalculate his net worth as Tesla and SpaceX trade, so each number is a snapshot of one moment rather than money moving in or out of an account.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Larry D. Moore – CC BY 4.0/Wikimedia Commons
