Wall Street Pauses After Midterm Surge as Musk's Stocks Keep Sliding

The afterparty is over. Futures wobbled in both directions Thursday after the Dow logged its best session since April 2025, rocketing more than 1,500 points on the back of the Democrats' decisive midterm win. Investors are now chewing on what a divided Washington actually means for their portfolios.

The rally's rocket fuel came from crude. Brent and WTI both settled lower after tumbling more than 8% during Wednesday's session — a slide that followed the Trump administration acknowledging the Iran war's role in the Republicans' rough night, according to CNBC. President Donald Trump, in a brief late-Wednesday call with CNBC's Eamon Javers, said he can work with Democratic majorities on 'many more things than people understand.'

Elon Musk's empire is still taking hits. Tesla and SpaceX are down again in premarket trading after each dropped more than 3% on Wednesday. The pair remain the clearest losers in a market that otherwise celebrated the political shift.

Qualcomm is the morning's standout casualty, with shares down more than 9% before the bell. The chipmaker's fourth-quarter smartphone chip sales came in below estimates, a miss that landed just as a broader tech rout deepened in Asia, where Japan's Nikkei and South Korea's Kospi both fell sharply. European markets, by contrast, traded broadly higher.

Crypto is holding steady while investors game out how the new Congress will treat digital assets. Bitcoin hovered near the $80,000 mark overnight, lifting the wider crypto complex with it.

Lurking beneath the relief rally is the debt limit — the single biggest political risk to markets in the year ahead, per CNBC's analysis. Unless Republicans can pull off a swift and unlikely show of unity in their final weeks in power, the coming fight could get uglier than ever, feeding volatility into a bond market that's already on edge.