Cathie Wood's Ark Invest Bought Over $51 Million of SpaceX Stock Last Week

It's been barely over one month since Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX), popularly known as SpaceX, debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange. In that short span of time, Cathie Wood's high-profile Ark Invest has continually increased its holdings of the company. None of the exchange-traded funds (ETFs) run by the investment and asset management firm has yet to sell a single share of the Elon Musk-led company.

Let's take a glance at these most recent buy-ins.

SpaceX is finding a place in multiple Ark ETFs

Last week, Wood and her team were avid buyers of SpaceX. On Tuesday, Ark Invest dipped its toes in the water as the stock hit its post-IPO lows, snapping up 44,196 shares valued at around $6.6 million. The following trading session saw the investment firm buy a much larger pack of 181,847 shares for roughly $27 million. Putting a cap on the week, on Friday, Ark snapped up 116,971 at around $17.8 million.

Per the famous firm's habit with large-scale buys, it allocated its brand-new SpaceX shares among several of its future-focused ETFs: 220,715 found their way into the Ark Innovation ETF (NYSEMKT: ARKK), the Ark Autonomous Tech & Robotics ETF (NYSEMKT: ARKQ) took in 70,531, and the Ark Next Generation Internet ETF (NYSEMKT: ARKW) absorbed 28,763.

Somewhat incongruously, the Ark Space & Defense Innovation ETF (NYSEMKT: ARKX) brought up the rear with 23,005 shares.

Ark has been a long-term investor in SpaceX for longer than most of us. That's because the firm began accumulating the company's shares even before the IPO, through its Ark Venture Fund (NASDAQMUTFUND: ARKVX), which invests in businesses before they list on stock exchanges. It still holds them to this day.

This, along with massive buy-ins on the stock's first day of trading and subsequent continuous purchases, has led certain Ark ETFs to amass impressively large stakes. With the above-mentioned transactions, the tally for the four non-Venture ETFs now stands as follows:

ETF	No. of shares	Total value
Ark Innovation	1,946,984	$296 million
Ark Autonomous Tech & Robotics	836,475	$127 million
Ark Space Exploration & Innovation	481,706	$73 million
Ark Next Generation Internet	366,817	$56 million

Data source: Ark Invest as of July 10, 2026. Note: The total value figures are rounded estimates.

Ark likes that SpaceX is 4 businesses in 1

Collectively, Wood and Ark love nothing less than a company pushing hard into the future, and that's one of the great appeals of SpaceX stock. It's a space exploration business, a developer of both artificial intelligence (AI) technology and the hardware that powers it, an important satellite communications company, and the operator of social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

While most of these businesses are cutting-edge and exciting, only one (the connectivity unit anchored by the Starlink satellite business) posted an operating profit last year. That came in at $4.4 billion. Meanwhile, another -- AI -- booked an extremely deep loss of nearly $6.4 billion.

SpaceX, as a company, is a mishmash of businesses that aren't necessarily synergistic. The space and AI units (the latter of which includes X) are likely to continue posting losses, possibly for years. That's sure to sap the considerable strength of the connectivity division's satellite operations. Personally, I'd be much more cautious about investing in SpaceX than Wood and her team.

Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Nasdaq. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.