Cathie Wood Has Been Betting On Elon Musk For Years And SpaceX Just Proved Her Right

Cathie Wood has been saying SpaceX would become a trillion-dollar company since before most investors could figure out how to buy a share of it. In January 2026, she told Bloomberg flatly:

"If SpaceX becomes the first trillion-dollar company, we won't be surprised, especially now, with the emergence of a whole new opportunity: space data centers."

On June 12, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq as SPCX at $135 per share and Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire before the closing bell. Wood was not surprised.

ARK Invest built SpaceX into the largest holding in its internal venture fund, ARKVX, starting in late 2023, when the company was valued at under $200 billion. By the time the IPO priced at $135 per share and a $1.77 trillion valuation, ARK's position had grown to represent 17.02 percent of the venture fund's net assets across more than $850 million in total assets.

Then the stock opened at $150, ran to $176 during the day and closed at $160.95, up 19.2 percent on its debut. The private-market bet that Wood had been making for two and a half years had become a public-market scorecard, and the first day's results were favorable.

Tesla (TSLA) is the largest holding in ARK's flagship innovation ETF at 10.22 percent. SpaceX is the largest holding in the venture fund. Elon Musk runs both companies.

Wood has been one of the most consistent and visible supporters of Musk's vision across every one of his enterprises, and the SpaceX IPO has given that support a market price.

The Orbital Data Center Thesis Nobody Else Has Priced In

The specific reason Wood was trending on Monday, beyond the general SpaceX IPO coverage, is the orbital data center analysis she first presented publicly at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills on May 6. Speaking with Bloomberg's Carol Massar and Joe Mathieu, Wood pulled back the curtain on research her firm had been developing internally without yet publishing.

"We have not added data centers, orbital data centers in," she told them of ARK's existing SpaceX valuation model. "However, our preliminary work suggests that that part of the business could take SpaceX from a revenue generation point of view, orders of magnitude higher. Ten, 20 times higher."

Ten to twenty times higher than current revenue projections. From a business line that no mainstream Wall Street model has yet incorporated. The pitch is not complicated in concept.

SpaceX wants to launch up to a million data center satellites into low Earth orbit, where they would have access to constant solar power above the atmosphere, sidestepping the land-use fights and electricity grid constraints that have been choking the buildout of terrestrial AI data centers.

Musk informed that thinking partly through his experience with data center buildout in Memphis and Mississippi, where power availability became the critical bottleneck.

Elon Musk read ARK's analysis of this vision and commented on the video ARK published. His response: "Interesting." From Musk, who does not typically validate investor theses in public, that is the specific response Wood needed.

The Tesla Robotaxi Conviction That Has Never Wavered

Wood has been through multiple cycles of Tesla skepticism and vindication since ARK made the company its flagship investment, and the June 2026 moment for Tesla is a complicated one. The stock has been relatively flat this year despite the SpaceX IPO excitement.

The unsupervised Robotaxi service that launched in Austin in June 2025, the proof of concept for the autonomous ride-hailing revenue that ARK's model treats as the primary Tesla value driver, has expanded across the Austin metropolitan area but has approximately 21 active vehicles, a fleet size that is nowhere near the scale needed for mass ride-hailing.

Wood's conviction has not moved. ARK's base-case Tesla model projects $4,600 per share with robotaxis accounting for approximately 60 percent of expected enterprise value. The logic is structural rather than dependent on current fleet size.

Tesla's Cybercab platform and existing vehicle hardware create a stack in which each additional vehicle in the fleet costs essentially zero marginal cost to add to the autonomous network.

Waymo is technologically mature and impressive, but each Waymo vehicle requires purchasing dedicated robotaxi hardware at a cost that does not approach zero. Tesla's edge, in Wood's analysis, is not that it is better at autonomous driving right now, it is that the economics of scaling the fleet are categorically different from any competitor.

Wood has recently ridden in an unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi herself. The ride got a $75 parking ticket. She announced on social media that ARK would be adding parking ticket liability to its Tesla valuation model.

That is the kind of detail that makes Cathie Wood interesting to follow regardless of where you stand on her specific price targets, the intellectual honesty of adjusting a valuation model because your own real-world data point introduced a cost you had not previously included.

What The SpaceX IPO Does To The ARK Story

The SpaceX IPO fundamentally changes the structure of Wood's Elon Musk thesis because it creates a public market price for the company she has believed in longest.

Before June 12, ARK's SpaceX position was a private-market bet that could only be evaluated on the terms ARK set.

As of June 12, SPCX is a publicly traded stock with a daily price and a market cap that the entire investing public can agree or disagree with in real time.

The ARK thesis on SpaceX as articulated before the IPO had three components: Starlink as the "financial engine," launch services as the "foundation," and orbital data centers as the unlisted upside that no model had captured. Two of those three components are now being priced by the market.

The third, orbital data centers, the ten-to-twenty-times revenue multiplier, remains outside the consensus valuation framework. Whether that is because the market is being disciplined or because the market is missing something is the bet Wood is maintaining.

She called the combination of SpaceX and Tesla "the convergence of a lifetime." Both companies are building toward a physical AI future, Tesla with autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, SpaceX with launch infrastructure, Starlink and now orbital compute. Musk runs both. Wood owns both.

The SpaceX IPO has made half of that convergence thesis visible in a public stock price.

The question the market is now answering every day is whether the orbital data center business arrives at the scale Wood is projecting. If it does, she will have called one of the most important technology investments of the decade before the public market had a way to participate. If it does not, the model was wrong and the stock finds a different equilibrium.

Wood was not surprised on June 12. She is watching the next chapter.