Tesla and SpaceX were both hammered Thursday as Wall Street turned against the AI infrastructure trade.
Tesla closed down 10.77% at $343.69. SpaceX fell 9.05% to $123.62, leaving the rocket, Starlink and AI company below its $135 June IPO price.
This was bigger than one bad day for Elon Musk.
The Nasdaq Composite dropped 5.5%, the S&P 500 lost 4.4%, and investors sold nearly every business tied to chips, data centers and the power systems behind them. But the two Musk companies now sit directly in that blast radius for different reasons.
Tesla trades on the promise that autonomy, robots and AI can become much larger businesses than car manufacturing. SpaceX has already crossed that line: its Super Intelligence segment became its biggest source of quarterly revenue.
The Associated Press reported that Thursday’s decline was the S&P 500’s worst day since the April 2025 tariff panic. The Dow lost 1,833 points, Nvidia fell 9.3%, AMD dropped 17.3%, and CoreWeave lost 9.8% as the selloff spread across the AI supply chain.
The market’s fear was not based on a new failure at Tesla or SpaceX. Investors were repricing the possibility that the American data-center buildout could slow under higher borrowing costs, local opposition and tougher political scrutiny after Tuesday’s midterm elections.
AI researcher Gary Marcus captured the severity while the market was still sliding:
Absolute slaughter.
Double digit losses for many AI companies. SpaceX 10% below IPO price, CoreWeave about to drop below its IPO price. Nvidia is down almost 10%
The AI industry’s day of reckoning may have finally come. pic.twitter.com/6S7mWPkzCY
— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) November 5, 2026
That distinction matters. Thursday was not a verdict that Starship failed, Starlink stopped growing or Tesla’s factories broke down.
It was a warning that investors no longer want to value every AI-related plan as if land, electricity, financing and permits will arrive on demand.
Musk reacted before the full selloff hit:
Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2026
That nine-word post landed as a joke, a political shot and a reminder of SpaceX’s long-term advantage. If launch costs fall far enough, orbital compute could bypass some of the land, grid and cooling fights now surrounding giant terrestrial data centers.
It was not an announcement of a new project, launch date or commercial service. The immediate exposure remains firmly on Earth.
SpaceX’s SEC-filed third-quarter results show why the stock was pulled into the AI rout. Revenue reached $14.6 billion, up 161% from a year earlier, while net income reached $4.4 billion and adjusted EBITDA hit $8.8 billion.
The company said its Super Intelligence business added $6.7 billion of revenue year over year from cloud agreements, the Cursor acquisition and products including Grok Bot. SpaceX also reported 1.7 gigawatts of nameplate compute capacity as of September 30.
AI became SpaceX’s largest segment by revenue in the quarter, even though Starlink connectivity remained the company’s biggest profit generator. That means SpaceX no longer trades like a launch company with a satellite broadband side business.
It trades partly like one of the largest AI infrastructure bets in the market.
Axios reported that the Nasdaq’s drop pushed it more than 10% below its October 6 high, the standard definition of a correction. Semiconductor shares fell roughly 9%, while companies that build data centers to rent computing power were among the hardest hit.
The political trigger added to financial pressure that was already building. Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on pausing new data-center construction until stronger protections are enacted, while Ohio Governor-elect Amy Acton called for conditional pauses tied to utility costs, community benefits and labor requirements.
Those election results do not cancel existing projects, and Congress has not passed a new AI law. They do make it harder for investors to assume that every proposed gigawatt will clear local review without delay or added expense.
SpaceX has made a massive financial commitment to prove that assumption wrong.
SpaceX announced on October 26 that it had secured a roughly $40 billion master finance lease for Nvidia GPUs and related equipment. The company called it the largest GPU financing ever and said it intends to build the world’s largest compute infrastructure.
That package gives SpaceX hardware and financing at extraordinary scale. It also gives shareholders an enormous execution test: those chips need sites, power, cooling, customers and returns.
Tesla faces its own version of the same test. Its valuation increasingly rests on FSD, Robotaxi and Optimus growing beyond the economics of selling electric vehicles, so a broad retreat from expensive AI promises hits Tesla even when the day’s news is not about vehicle deliveries.
The final closing numbers captured the pressure. Tesla lost $41.50 per share, SpaceX lost $12.30, and Nvidia’s 9.3% fall made it the single heaviest drag on the S&P 500.
One violent session does not settle the value of autonomy, Starlink, Starship or AI compute. It does reset the burden of proof.
For SpaceX, the next convincing answer has to come from turning its huge compute build into durable profit without starving the rockets and satellites that made the company powerful. For Tesla, it has to come from shipping autonomy and robotics results that justify an AI-sized valuation.
On Thursday, Wall Street stopped paying in advance.
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