SpaceX shares dropped to around $117, roughly 5% below the $135 IPO price, wiping out more than $1 trillion in market value over the past month alone. That's the context in which ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood stepped up to defend an $80 million allocation and made one of her boldest calls yet.

"We think this could become the most important company in history, and I mean in global history," Wood said, tying that view to SpaceX's launch business, Starlink's satellite network, and a fast-growing data center strategy. The timing matters: the stock is under pressure partly because of a planned $116 billion share unlock that could trigger selling by early holders.

Why Wood isn't moving

Wood's argument rests on a structural point about telecom. Traditional telecoms expanded country by country, acquiring national carriers. Starlink skips that entirely. SpaceX already controls roughly 75% of satellites currently in orbit, giving it a global communications layer no ground-based competitor can replicate at comparable speed or cost.

She also flagged orbital data centers as a potential cost advantage for AI training, suggesting that compute run from orbit could become economically competitive, particularly for Elon Musk's other ventures. Musk himself has warned short-sellers bluntly: firms maintaining significant short positions in SpaceX "over time" face very low survival probability, he wrote.

Texas expansion signals the AI pivot is real

SpaceX is scouting multiple Texas sites for at least one large-scale data center, a project that could match or exceed the scale of its Memphis-area hub, which already runs two facilities with around 1 gigawatt of compute capacity. Staff have already been relocated to Texas ahead of the build-out.

The company has signed AI computing deals with Anthropic and Google, which means this isn't speculative capacity. Revenue streams are already forming. Whether the stock can recover from its post-IPO dip depends heavily on whether those AI infrastructure bets pay out before the share unlock pressure hits.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or an investment recommendation.