Cathie Wood

Cathie Wood (born 1955) spent decades in institutional money management before founding ARK Invest in 2014 to run actively managed ETFs devoted entirely to disruptive innovation. Her flagship ARKK fund became the emblem of the 2020 bull market, cratered in 2022, and staged an AI-fueled comeback in 2025 — a round trip that made her simultaneously one of the most followed and most criticized investors in America.

All-in on the AI supercycle

Wood’s research letters and interviews frame AI as the organizing catalyst among the technology platforms ARK tracks. In a 2023 Fortune interview she called AI the biggest catalyst to change of the next decade, argued productivity gains could transform the $32 trillion paid annually to knowledge workers, and named Tesla — run by Elon Musk — “the biggest A.I. play out there.” ARK’s research projects AI infrastructure spending reaching $1.4 trillion by 2030, and by late 2025 Wood was calling humanoid robots the biggest of all AI opportunities, with “explosive” payoffs coming in robotaxis.

Her funds hold concentrated positions across the AI stack — Tesla, Palantir, Coinbase, and private exposure to OpenAI and Anthropic — and she has kept buying through volatility, even while flagging in October 2025 that a “reality check” correction in AI valuations was possible. Critics point to ARKK’s brutal 2021–22 drawdown as proof her forecasts run ahead of returns; defenders note the disruption she bet on — from EVs to LLMs — largely arrived, whatever the fund math.