Cathie Wood got mocked for years over her Elon Musk bets. One firm even called her a wealth destroyer.
Now SpaceX is about to go public. And her big bet looks smart again.
SpaceX is the top holding in Wood's $1 billion ARK Venture Fund, and money is rushing in to get a piece. The fund held $711 million in March, then hit about $1 billion by the end of May.
That is a jump of nearly 40% in two months. SpaceX excitement drove almost all of it.
Wood was early, too. She first bought in back in late 2023, when SpaceX was worth under $200 billion.
She got even more exposure in a roundabout way. SpaceX merged with Musk's AI startup, xAI, earlier this year.
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Wood's team skips the usual labels like "tech" or "industrial." Her director of investment analysis, Tasha Keeney, says those labels are broken.
Instead, ARK sorts firms by big ideas, like space, AI and robots. It is a bit like sorting a bookshelf by topic, not by color.
Wood called this moment "the convergence of a lifetime." She pointed to her long bets on the moon and Mars.
Keeney has a simple line on holding these stocks for years. "Equity capital is perpetual capital," she said, meaning patient money should think in decades.
The same stubborn streak worries her critics. The firm Morningstar has long flagged how ARK handles risk, since its bets can swing hard.
Wood has heard the doubts for years. Her funds took a beating when rates rose in 2022.
She did not blink. She kept buying the bold names she believed in.
Wood has long argued her style needs patience. Her bets can take years to pay off, she says.
Now the bet may finally pay off in full. SpaceX is the one to watch.
Wood runs about $16 billion in all, so SpaceX is one big piece of a bigger machine. Two of her other private bets, OpenAI and Anthropic, may go public later too.
Regular buyers cannot grab SpaceX shares on their own before it lists, so a fund like Wood's has been one of the few ways in. Most people cannot buy into private firms at all, which makes that fund a rare backdoor.
The IPO is the clearest test of Wood's whole idea yet, and a win could quiet some of the doubters. ARK plans to keep selling that idea to the public.
"We'll certainly be out there educating," Keeney said. That access is a big reason the money keeps flowing to Wood.
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