Cathie Wood’s $60 Million Venture Fund Nabs Stake in Elon Musk’s xAI

Isabelle Lee, Bloomberg News

Catherine Wood Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management has purchased a stake in Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI, part of a growing wager that the nascent AI industry will revolutionize global tech.

Wood’s Ark Venture Fund revealed the stake in an email to clients Tuesday. It represents about 2% of the fund’s holdings, Ark Chief Futurist Brett Winton said in an interview. The purchase comes a month after the fund disclosed a position in OpenAI that made up roughly 4% of its holdings. The closed-end interval fund also has a stake in AI firm Anthropic, accounting for about 5% of assets.

“xAI’s access to X’s distribution and real-time data differentiates it from any other AI play, particularly when combined with Elon Musk’s maniacal focus on velocity,” Winton said by phone. “AI foundation models are going to be worth multiple trillions of dollars by the end of this decade.”

Launched in 2023, xAI announced in a blog post on May 26 that it raised $6 billion via a series B funding round. Musk has been an early supporter of AI and at one point backed OpenAI before it introduced ChatGPT in late 2022.

Wood’s Ark Venture Fund, launched in September 2022, invests in both public and private firms — including Musk’s SpaceX, Epic Games, Freenome Holdings and Relation Therapeutics. Private companies make up around 80% of total holdings.

Wood catapulted to fame during the pandemic after making big bets on firms including Tesla Inc., and is known to be a longstanding Musk bull. This year, her most famous vehicle, the $6.2 billion Ark Innovation ETF, has stumbled following a decline in the share price of the electric car maker, among other wagers.

--With assistance from Ed Ludlow.