Ark Invest bought more than $500 million worth of SpaceX shares on IPO day
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- ARK Invest bought nearly 3.3 million SpaceX shares worth over $500 million on Friday, the day of the largest IPO in history, with the ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) ending the day with SpaceX at 3.28% of its portfolio.
- SpaceX priced at $135 per share and closed at $160.95, a 19.2% first-day pop, and ARK's internal model targets a $2.5 trillion enterprise value for the company by 2030, with a bull case near $3.1 trillion.
- Cathie Wood's firm liquidated roughly $280 million of stock the week before the listing, then sold another ~948,000 shares across at least 13 companies worth $48 million+ on IPO day, including AMD, Roku, and Baidu.
- ARK also operates a spot bitcoin ETF and Wood has been one of the most vocal institutional bitcoin bulls with seven-figure long-term price targets — making her rotation into SpaceX a notable institutional signal.
- Bitcoin and other crypto markets face continued capital outflows, as the article argues even major crypto bulls are now favoring AI and space IPOs, with OpenAI and Anthropic also filing to go public.
- SpaceX carried a $350 billion private valuation in 2024, providing the anchor for ARK's 2030 enterprise value model that assumes roughly 7x growth over six years.
Why it matters: Even Cathie Wood — one of the most vocal institutional bitcoin advocates — is rotating risk capital out of crypto-adjacent names (she liquidated $325M+ of stock across 13 companies around the SpaceX listing) and into SpaceX at a 19.2% first-day pop, a concrete signal that institutional money is now favoring AI and space listings over digital assets in the near term.
