Dumping Tesla and AMD. Cathie Wood Spends $443 Million in Heavy Bet on Musk’s Space Empire SpaceX.

TradingKey - Cathie Wood is betting her biggest hand on Elon Musk's space empire.

The latest trading records disclosed by ARK Invest show that several of its ETFs collectively acquired approximately 3.29 million shares of SpaceX ( SPCX) shares, deploying approximately $443 million in capital.

Interestingly, these shares were not acquired through public market bidding, but through the ARK Venture Fund, a vehicle dedicated to the private equity sector—essentially securing a ticket before SpaceX's official IPO.

Following this allocation, SpaceX's weight in the ARK Venture Fund's net assets climbed to 11.38%, solidifying its position as the top holding.

Selling Tesla and AMD, Broadly Reducing Tech Exposure

To free up sufficient capital for this concentrated bet, ARK implemented a near-total trim of its existing holdings on the same trading day.

The list of divestments spanned multiple sectors; in the chip sector, AMD ( AMD) was sold off by approximately 80,000 shares, realizing nearly $40 million; streaming platform Roku ( ROKU) was reduced for two consecutive days, with a cumulative offloading of nearly 100,000 shares; autonomous driving benchmark Tesla ( TSLA) was also cut by about 40,000 shares, recouping approximately $16 million; other names included Baidu ( BIDU ), Rocket Lab ( RKLB ), cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike ( CRWD) and Cloudflare ( NET ), among others.

From semiconductors to streaming media, and from autonomous driving to cybersecurity, ARK systematically reduced positions across almost all mature tech sectors, funneling the recycled capital into the single direction of the space industry.

Underpinning this aggressive maneuver is ARK’s consistent investment philosophy: the most substantial wealth accumulation often occurs before a company hits the public markets. SpaceX’s valuation trajectory serves as a vivid footnote to this logic.

ARK first began building its position at the end of 2023, when the aerospace giant’s valuation was under $200 billion. By 2024, it had climbed to $350 billion, and according to its confidential S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, its target IPO valuation is aimed at $1.75 trillion. From initial entry to the eve of its listing, the valuation has expanded nearly ninefold, and ARK is clearly unwilling to miss out on this most lucrative growth phase.

Their internal models provide an extremely optimistic projection for SpaceX's long-term prospects. Under a base-case scenario, the enterprise value would be approximately $2.5 trillion by 2030; the bull case reaches $3.1 trillion, and even under bear-case assumptions, it stands at $1.7 trillion, largely aligning with the target IPO valuation.

However, betting more than 10% of the fund’s net assets on a single private equity target is a double-edged sword, meaning SpaceX's post-IPO stock performance will directly and significantly impact the net asset value (NAV) curve of the ARK Venture Fund.