ARK’s SpaceX Buying Spree That Shook the Market Like a Soviet Tractor

On that fateful Friday – the kind of day when history pretends to be surprised by its own repetition – ARK Invest marched into the SpaceX IPO like a regiment sent to the front with orders written in trembling hands. Nearly 3.3 million shares were seized, clutched, hoarded – call it what you will – forming a stake worth more than $500 million before the sun even set. A modest sum, of course, for those who believe rockets should fly not only upward but also toward their wallets.

The shares, priced at $135, closed at $160.95 – a 19.2% rise, the sort of “first-day pop” that makes traders feel like heroes of labor, though none will receive medals, only tax forms.

Cathie Wood’s firm, in a maneuver reminiscent of a commissar clearing out the grain stores before winter, liquidated nearly $280 million in stock the week before the listing. Then, as if warming up, it sold another 948,000 shares across 13 companies on Friday – AMD, Roku, Baidu, and others who probably didn’t even get a goodbye note. All this according to the daily emailed statements, which arrive with the punctuality of a bureaucrat and the charm of a ration card.

The ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) bore the brunt of the operation, ending the day with SpaceX occupying 3.28% of its portfolio – a number that looks suspiciously precise, as if calculated by someone who has stared too long into the abyss of spreadsheets.

A first-day surge of nearly 20% on the largest IPO in human memory suggests institutions are once again paying handsomely for high-beta innovation – the financial equivalent of betting your last potato on a horse named “Volatility.” Bitcoin may still be the wildest creature in the forest, but the new fashionable hunt is AI and space IPOs. OpenAI and Anthropic have also filed to go public, because apparently gravity is optional now.

Risk capital, like human patience, is finite. And when even a bitcoin zealot such as Wood begins rotating toward space ventures instead of adding to crypto, it signals that funds may continue draining from the crypto markets – much like water leaking from a cracked Soviet-era radiator.

ARK’s model envisions SpaceX reaching a $2.5 trillion enterprise value by 2030, with a bull case near $3.1 trillion – all built atop the company’s $350 billion private valuation in 2024. Ambitious, yes, but ambition is the one resource capitalism and central planning share equally.

ARK also runs a spot bitcoin ETF, and Wood has long been one of the most vocal institutional bitcoin advocates, with long-term price targets climbing into seven figures – numbers so large they begin to resemble the population counts in Russian novels.