Ark Investment Management founder Cathie Wood has recently invested approximately $7 million to increase her stake in Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX. This move comes less than a month after the company's historic IPO, which briefly made Musk the world's first trillionaire.
Wood and Ark are now placing a significant bet on their conviction that, in a best-case scenario, SpaceX could achieve a $3.1 trillion enterprise valuation by 2030, driven primarily by its artificial intelligence, data center, and aerospace businesses. The company's current market capitalization stands at $1.9 trillion.
This marks the third time Ark has bought the dip since SpaceX's listing last month. On the company's first trading day, Ark was one of the major buyers, with several of its exchange-traded funds collectively purchasing nearly 3.3 million shares for about $443 million. In late last month, when the stock experienced its first large-scale sell-off post-IPO, Ark added another $32 million to its position. Since 2023, Ark Invest has also invested in SpaceX through private market transactions.
Following Wood's recent $7 million investment, Ark's flagship fund, ARKK alone, holds 1.78 million shares of SpaceX valued at nearly $266 million. SpaceX has now become the fund's seventh-largest holding, accounting for 4% of its total portfolio.
To free up capital for this latest investment, Wood sold approximately 570,000 shares of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Last year, the firm resumed its position in Alibaba after a four-year hiatus, investing $16.3 million across two ETFs. These transactions indicate that SpaceX clearly remains at the top of Wood's priority investment list.
Wood increased her stake in the company this week as SpaceX's share price retreated. As of Wednesday, SpaceX shares were trading at $149 each, having fallen 13% over the past five trading sessions and now trading below the IPO price set three weeks ago. The stock is down 29% from the all-time closing high of $211 reached last month.
Despite the share price weakness, Ark Invest's core 2026 research report, "Big Ideas," shows Wood maintains a long-term bullish outlook on SpaceX's development prospects.
The report notes that over the 17 years from 2008 to the present, SpaceX has reduced space launch costs by approximately 95%, with the current cost per kilogram at around $1,000. Ark Invest judges that the company has the potential to further reduce the cost of space launch to $100 per kilogram in the future.
This would significantly aid SpaceX and Musk's ambitious and groundbreaking vision of building orbital data centers. Musk believes that as AI model capabilities continue to advance, the scale of computing power required by AI companies will be difficult to balance in terms of cost and supply using ground-based facilities.
Musk has proposed that building data centers in space is the solution to this challenge, a viewpoint with which Wood strongly agrees.
In a May interview, she stated, "We believe the impact of this technological revolution will far surpass that of the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, humanity will certainly need orbital data centers."
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