ARK Invest chief executive Cathie Wood says Tesla's Robotaxi business has reached a turning point, and her firm has been buying Tesla shares through the recent sell-off rather than cutting its position. Speaking to CNBC at the UP.Summit at Kennedy Space Center on Friday, Wood said the driverless ride-hailing service was now winning over customers, even as Tesla's share price has tumbled.

Wood, one of Tesla's longest-standing and most vocal supporters, said ARK had used the recent correction in Tesla and SpaceX shares to increase its exposure to both companies, which she described as among the firm's highest-conviction holdings. She said the firm's trades are published every day, so investors could see the buying for themselves.

Her central claim was about Robotaxi. Tesla launched its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, in mid-2025, and Wood said the business had now gathered its own momentum. She told CNBC that Robotaxi had hit escape velocity by delighting customers, and that this was the moment ARK had been waiting for, so the firm was not worried about the recent share price falls.

The timing is striking. Tesla shares fell 10.77% on Thursday as part of a broad market sell-off, closing at $343.69, and the stock has dropped by more than 10% over the past week. On Friday, the shares bounced back, gaining 4.23% to close at $358.22. The Motley Fool reported that ARK had already ploughed $50 million into Tesla after the company's last quarterly report, adding 160,000 shares to its holdings.

Wood acknowledged that Tesla chief executive Elon Musk could face political distractions, including the possibility of being called to testify, but argued that his ability to manage many responsibilities at once set him apart. She described Musk as a maestro at compartmentalisation like no one else she had ever seen.

The interview ranged well beyond Tesla's cars. Wood pointed to the growing importance of SpaceX's ambitions beyond rocket launches, in particular the possibility of building data centres in orbit. She argued that the difficulties facing data centres on Earth, from power supply to planning permission, could make space-based infrastructure more attractive than many people think, and she raised the possibility of powering such facilities with nuclear energy rather than relying only on solar power.

Wood also weighed in on Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, which is reported to be preparing for a public listing. She suggested the current turbulence in AI stocks could push its eventual valuation towards the lower end of the reported $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion range. But she said the company's financial performance deserved far more attention than the valuation debate, calling the numbers in its published S-1 filing astonishing. She highlighted strong revenue growth and operating profitability, noting that Anthropic was using about 75% of its computing power for training, a major expense, while still managing to remain profitable.

She connected the AI boom to a wider productivity story, pointing to recent US economic data showing annualised productivity growth of 3.7% and unit labour costs falling by 0.7%. Wood said this could mark the beginning of the productivity revolution ARK has long predicted, adding that workers could eventually share in the economic benefits of those gains.

Wood's optimism rests on a long-term view that many Wall Street analysts do not share. ARK published an updated Tesla valuation model in October, putting the expected value of the shares at about $4,400 in 2031, with robotaxis accounting for roughly 80% of the company's enterprise value. That is far above the average Wall Street price target of about $398, and it depends on a business that is still small today: the robotaxi service operates in seven US cities, according to reports on the model.

Not everyone is convinced. Retail sentiment towards Tesla on Stocktwits was in extremely bearish territory at the time of Wood's interview, and Tesla's electric vehicle sales declined in both 2024 and 2025, with sales only stabilising so far in 2026. Wood's own firm has acknowledged that the robotaxi rollout has been slower than it once expected. But for Wood, the recent share price fall is an opportunity, not a warning. As she put it, corrections are the moment to concentrate investment in the companies she believes have the strongest long-term potential.