Cathie Wood Swaps Tesla for SpaceX in $529M Elon Musk Pivot

Cathie Wood bought $529.7 million of SpaceX stock on its first day of trading and sold Tesla shares at the same time. Both companies belong to Elon Musk, but Wood’s conviction has clearly shifted.

The trades came on June 12, SpaceX’s IPO day, when shares surged 19% and Musk’s net worth crossed $1 trillion for the first time. ARK bought 3.29 million SpaceX shares at the IPO price of $135, a position worth $529.7 million at closing. ARK then trimmed Tesla alongside Advanced Micro Devices, Rocket Lab, Roku, and Baidu on the same day.

Why Wood Is Moving On From Tesla

Tesla has been one of ARK’s core holdings for years, and Wood has publicly defended it through multiple down cycles. But the EV maker faces a different landscape today: Chinese rivals have narrowed the gap, margins are under pressure, and Musk’s political visibility has become a liability for some buyers.

SpaceX is a different proposition. Its Starlink satellite internet division is the company’s only profitable business, and it is growing fast. Wood first bought SpaceX in late 2023, and the stake became the largest holding in ARK’s roughly $1 billion internal venture fund. The IPO gave ARK the chance to scale that conviction in public markets.

The SpaceX Trade and Its Risks

The $529.7 million buy is a large commitment, even by ARK’s standards. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 and closed 19% higher on day one.

SpaceX carries an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion as of March 31. And the IPO’s retail allocation sits at 30% of the offering, three to six times the typical level.

ARK’s Performance Context

The ARK Innovation ETF is up 1.61% year to date, while the S&P 500 has gained around 9%. Over the past 12 months, the fund recorded roughly $294 million in net outflows. A Morningstar analysis found the fund wiped out $7 billion in investor wealth from 2014 to 2024.

Wood’s IPO bets follow a pattern. ARK bought Coinbase after its 2021 listing and CoreWeave more recently, each time seeking early exposure to high-conviction names. SpaceX is the biggest version of that bet yet.

Whether SpaceX turns that deficit into durable profit, or this becomes ARK’s next painful lesson, is a question the market will spend years answering.

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