ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, one of the leading voices on Wall Street, is praising Twitter CEO Elon Musk for his leadership, ambition, and management of the struggling social media network.
Key Details
- Axios hosted its half-day Axios BFD: San Francisco conference on Wednesday afternoon, speaking with business leaders about important issues from ESG investing to the ongoing debt default crisis and the impact of the economy on business.
- ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood spoke for a segment about her company’s investments with Twitter, Tesla, and CoinBase.
- Wood praised Musk repeatedly, arguing that he has done an excellent job resurrecting Twitter with a new vision, noting that the previous business model was unworkable and was not able to be monetized.
- Wood denied claims that her confidence in Musk’s work is due to special knowledge about his companies and finances.
- She also claimed that Tesla’s self-driving cars are six times safer than normal cars.
Why It’s Important
It is easy to look at Elon Musk’s leadership style and write him off as foolish or easily distracted, as many have. NASA administrators have worried he is too distracted to deliver his rocket innovations on time, Tesla investors have protested his controversial leadership among valuation and productivity dips, and recent failures with Starship and Neuralink have soured his image—well after his chaotic early months at Twitter resulted in mass-firings and media hostility.
However, Wood remains highly optimistic about Musk’s work. She was an early investor in Tesla, and her company currently owns $850 million in Tesla stock—ARK Invest’s largest current investment. She also joined as one of the central investors in Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with her venture fund helping to finance the October 2022, $44-billion transaction through a public-private crossover fund. She even said Wednesday that she is eager to buy more of Twitter.
Notable Quotes
“We are so excited by what he’s doing. Regardless of your political leanings, when someone like Tucker Carlson is fired from Fox and says, ‘I’m putting the show on Twitter,’ something is changing in the media world. And I believe Elon’s push toward an ‘everything’ app is going to be successful,” says Wood.
“I think he’s surrounded himself with brilliant people at Tesla and SpaceX. He’s our renaissance man—the inventor of our age—and has an enormous capacity to take on new projects. Tesla is the most important project, and we think the autonomous project is the most ambitious AI project out there. We think full self-driving is almost here. He has time to devote to Twitter. If he’s happy, I’m happy—and he’s excited about what he’s doing.”
