- ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood is one of America’s biggest fans of Elon Musk, and her firm’s flagship product has a big-time bet on Tesla. One of the investing world’s most famous tech bulls, Wood said Tuesday that robotaxis will boost Tesla’s margins from the mid-teens to 70% to 90%, and she doesn’t think the world’s richest man will be derailed by his current involvement in the Trump White House.
It’s hard to find investors who are placing bigger bets on artificial intelligence—and Elon Musk—than Cathie Wood. The ARK Invest founder and CEO has become one of America’s most famous tech bulls, and the recent selloff in tech stocks amid President Donald Trump’s new tariff salvo isn’t changing her long-term thesis.
For all the buzz, however, investors have been much better off being exposed to the broader market than Wood’s flagship product, the $6 billion ARK Innovation ETF (ticker ARKK). Over the past five years, the fund gained just 2%, while the S&P 500 has nearly doubled in value during that span. Last year, Wood’s fund appreciated over 12%, but that was still just about half the S&P’s 24% rally.
The ETF is down more than 6.5% so far this year. Much of that can be blamed on shares of Tesla, ARKK’s largest holding at 11% of the portfolio, which fell 28% since the start of 2025. That hasn’t dented her fondness, however, for the electric vehicle manufacturer’s divisive CEO.
“Elon Musk is the inventor of our age,” Wood said during a live recording of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast at a conference hosted by the company in downtown Manhattan.
Wood also gives ordinary investors exposure to the private ventures of the world’s richest man, including SpaceX, social media platform X, and artificial intelligence startup xAI, through her firm’s ARK Venture Fund. She doesn’t think those endeavors, nor Musk’s heavy involvement with the Trump White House as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, will distract him from his work running Tesla.
“He’s surrounded himself by businesspeople and engineers who want to work on the hardest projects in the world,” Wood said of Musk, “the hardest projects that are going to help transform the way we live and work.”
Speaking of the new administration, Wood believes a second Trump presidency will usher in a new era of tax cuts and deregulation that will spur innovation. She offered a comparison to the “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s, which she tied to the rise of the PC.
“It was the heyday, golden age of active management,” she said. “I think that’s coming back. I think it’s coming back big-time. I think this will dwarf that, and that was pretty good.”
The success of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek led to questions about Big Tech’s massive wave of AI spending and whether it will prove a worthwhile investment. But Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft are still planning on spending as much as $320 billion on AI technologies and data-center build-outs in 2025, per CNBC, which cited management commentary on these firms’ latest earnings calls.
Wood is anticipating an R&D explosion in health care—CRISPR Therapeutics represents 5% of ARKK’s portfolio, making it the ETF’s sixth-largest holding. However, the largest AI project on earth, she said, is robotaxis.
Wood said autonomous vehicles represent an $8 trillion to $10 trillion opportunity, the biggest reason why ARK has a $2,600 price target on Tesla stock by 2029. That would give Tesla a market cap of more than $9 trillion. (Apple is currently the most valuable company in the world with a $3.5 trillion valuation.)
Right now, Tesla’s GAAP gross margin sits at 16%. Wood said autonomous vehicles will bump that number up to the 70% to 90% margins typical of strong software companies. That’s why it’s a mistake, she said, to view Tesla simply as an EV manufacturer.
“It’s winner take most,” Wood said. “And we do believe that Tesla will be and is in the pole position here in the United States.”
Correction: The headline for this story initially misquoted Cathie Wood. The relevant quote was correctly noted in the story. Fortune regrets the error.
