Cathie Wood just bought the SpaceX dip again—and dumped Alibaba to do it

Investor Cathie Wood is betting millions SpaceX’s stock, like its rockets, is headed for the moon.

The CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Invest recently put about $7 million into Elon Musk’s rocket company, buying the dip less than a month after its historic IPO—one that briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

Now, Wood and ARK are putting major money behind their belief SpaceX could, in the best case scenario, reach an enterprise value of $3.1 trillion by 2030, driven by its AI, data center, and aerospace businesses. It currently has a market cap of $1.9 trillion.

This is now the third time ARK has bought the dip since SpaceX’s IPO last month. On the day of its market debut, ARK was among the biggest buyers, purchasing about 3.3 million shares, that could have set it back an estimated $500 million, across several of its ETFs. Late last month, it also put in an additional $32 million into the stock after its first major selloff since its IPO. Since 2023, ARK has also invested in SpaceX through private market transactions.

ARK Invest did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Following Wood’s most recent $7 million purchase, ARK’s flagship Innovation ETF alone holds 1.78 million SpaceX shares worth nearly $266 million. SpaceX is now the fund’s seventh-largest holding and makes up 4% of its total holdings.

To free up cash for the latest purchase, Wood sold roughly 570,000 shares in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which ARK has invested in since 2014. The firm reopened its position in Alibaba last year when it put $16.3 million into the company across two of its ETFs after a four year absence. Before that, Wood partly rotated out of China stocks because of a crackdown by China’s government on domestic companies in 2021. Even after returning, SpaceX is apparently higher atop Wood’s priority list.

Wood doubled down on her SpaceX bet this week as shares retreated. As of Wednesday, SpaceX stock was trading at $149 per share, down 13% over the past five days and now trading below the price it debuted at three weeks ago. Its shares have fallen 29% from its highest-ever close last month of $211. 

Still, ARK’s flagship research Big Ideas report for 2026 shows Wood is looking far into the future when it comes to SpaceX.

The report notes SpaceX has, in the 17 years since 2008, brought down the cost to send mass into space by about 95% to about $1,000 per kilogram. By extension, the firm argues SpaceX could eventually bring down the price of sending mass into space to $100 per kilogram.

This would be extremely helpful to SpaceX and Musk’s moonshot idea to build orbital data centers. As AI models get more powerful, Musk has argued AI companies will require more compute than can be provided at a practical cost on Earth. 

Building in space, Musk has argued, is the solution. And Wood tends to agree.

“We think this technology revolution is going to dwarf the industrial revolution by far. So I think that we’ll need the orbital data centers,” she said in a May interview with Bloomberg.

To be sure, several experts have previously told Fortune orbital data centers are still many years away from becoming a reality. To generate just one gigawatt of power in space, you would need a square kilometer of solar panels and thus a massive solar array that is heavy and expensive to take into orbit, semiconductor expert and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Boon Ooi, previously told Fortune.

Even billionaire Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son has criticized Musk’s orbital data center idea, saying he would rather focus on building AI data centers on Earth because building in space will take many years and a large investment.

Still, Wood’s bullishness for SpaceX isn’t surprising given her long-standing admiration for its founder. 

She has repeatedly defended Musk as he found himself embroiled in controversy, including for a stint as leader of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in which he helped cut billions of dollars in funding to federal agencies and laid off nearly 300,000 workers.

“History will look kindly, much more than kindly, on Elon Musk’s profound contributions to the US and to humanity,” she wrote in a post on X in March.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com