Legendary investor and CEO of Ark Invest Cathie Wood has made no secret of her support of Elon Musk—and Tesla in particular. And she’s putting her money where her mouth is.
She owns two of the iconic EVs, Wood said in a video interview for Fortune following her main stage panel at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen conference in San Diego on Wednesday. She keeps a Model 3 at her home in Wilton, Connecticut, and a Model Y at her home in St. Petersburg, Florida. “So I'm covered," she said.
Wood is “absolutely” still bullish on Elon Musk, despite his controversies and often questionable public statements, she said.
“What Elon Musk is doing to transform the world is unbelievable,” Wood said. “From autonomous taxi networks, to space exploration, to Starlink over Ukraine, [he’s] really bringing broadband to the whole world. Two billion people that do not have an internet connection.”
Alongside Neuralink and The Boring Company, he is now helming Twitter. “So he is going to be a force against censorship, I believe, and that’s a very good idea.”
Not everyone agrees with her here; in fact, trust in Musk and his vision has long been diminishing, and just last week he announced he'd be hiring a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, to run Twitter day-to-day. Nonetheless, as for whether Musk's investment in Twitter was a good or bad idea, Wood held steadfast. “Well, in our venture fund, we own Twitter, so we must think it's a good idea,” she said. “And I do believe he will achieve some measure of success in turning it into a super app or—as he calls it—an everything app, which is payments-focused commerce, as well as chat.”
Earlier that day at the conference, she told Fortune editor in chief Alyson Shontell just how much she trusts Musk’s vision. At Ark Invest, Wood focuses on five exponential growth industries. Tesla sits at the convergence of three of them: artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
Tesla is going straight for the moon in her eyes. She expects it to see “explosive growth,” with or without Musk. Tesla is in the pole position (the most beneficial position on the starting track), she explained, because of its sheer magnitude. With 4 million robots, as Wood calls them, on the road, continuously collecting data, it has by far the most information of any of its competitors. That gives it the upper hand for analyzing “the corner cases, the exceptions, and what causes accidents,” she said.
Wood has been a Tesla investor for years, and her hope isn’t wavering. Last month, she said Tesla’s planned robotaxi fleet rollout will be “one of the most important investment opportunities of our lifetimes,” and predicted that Tesla stock will surge over 1,100% by 2027.
