Cathie Wood on How AI Can Double GDP, Bull Case for Bitcoin $1M, Elon’s Trillion-Dollar Pay Package

One of the most disruptive and innovative forces in the ETF world today, the investor queen Kathy Wood. The ARC Innovation ETF trading now near a 52- week high returned an astounding 148% >> returning more than 170% last year now has $17 billion under management. My conviction is so high because of what I do on a day-to-day basis. We are doing original research trying to figure out these companies that are going to transform the world. >> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Art Invests Kathy Wood. [Music] Well, greetings. I'm so delighted to be here—my maiden voyage—and I am here to talk about how the world is going to transform during the next 5 to 10 years, how much more rapidly we will see real GDP grow, how low inflation is going to be, and why. So here we go.

Here is a timeline of innovation. You can see it goes into the 1700s. Our chief futurist, Brett Winton, in conjunction with academics, pulled this together. What you're seeing here is the impact of innovation on productivity, and you can see that in this time we've had 2 great eras.

The first one was in the late 1800s and early 1900s: telephone, electricity, internal combustion engine—a huge boost in GDP growth. In fact, prior to that, for the 400 years prior, real GDP growth had been averaging about 0.6% per year. Very slow. After that, we went into a 125-year period of 3% real GDP growth—a 5-fold increase, from 0.6% to 3%.

You have to move forward to today to see multiple innovation platforms evolving at the same time. For the first time in 125 years, there are 5 platforms—not 3 major platforms—and they involve 15 different technologies. This is very important in terms of how to research and analyze the world. It's not going to be by sector or industry anymore. It is going to be by technology, because technology is permeating every sector and every industry, blurring the lines between them.

You can see the 5 here. We believe that the productivity uplift is going to be so strong during the next 5 to 10 years, and I think President Trump's tax package is going to turbocharge this, that real GDP growth will accelerate from the 3% where it has been for the last 125 years toward 7% or more. We think that could be conservative. That's a little more than 2 times, as opposed to the 5-fold uplift before. So get ready.

The other thing we think is going to happen is that inflation is going to surprise significantly on the low side of expectations. We would not be surprised to see 0% inflation or less as we exit the tariffs here and the way they're getting through the indexes, and move forward into this new age of technological explosion.

One of the reasons for this explosion is not just the 5 platforms. I should have named them: robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and multiomic sequencing—5 major platforms involving 15 different technologies. Here you can see why we think we're going to see explosive growth: it is the convergence between and among these technologies.

Just to give you 2 examples of convergence, in the autonomous mobility space, that is the convergence of robotics, energy storage, and artificial intelligence. Each one of those technologies, or platforms, is following its own S-curve, and we are moving into the sweet spot of the S-curve now that autonomous taxis are debuting—in the case of Tesla, in Austin and San Francisco. Waymo has been there for a while. Just think about that: 1 S-curve feeding another S-curve, feeding another S-curve. That's why we're going to see explosive growth.

Another example is in the healthcare space. While the autonomous mobility space might be the biggest revenue generator in the short term, we believe that the most profound application of AI is in healthcare. That's the convergence of sequencing technologies, artificial intelligence, and technologies like CRISPR gene editing. I think this is the sleeper. It's the most inefficiently priced part of the market.

You can see why it's going to be so important to set up research departments by technology, not by sector or industry. On this last page, here is what we think is going to happen to the equity market in terms of valuations.

In the turquoise, that's the Magnificent 6. It used to be called the Magnificent 7, but they threw Tesla out when it wasn't behaving like the rest of the Magnificent 6. You can see that from 2019 to 2024, the Magnificent 6 tripled in valuation, in market cap, whereas truly disruptive innovation, in the purple at the bottom, went up only 30%.

That's because investors were playing it safe. They were investing only in the largest, most cash-rich stocks in the market. That was a very difficult time for innovation and for venture capital generally. You can see what we expect to happen over the next 5 years. The Magnificent 6—some of them will do well, while some are facing headwinds. Apple's challenges in the AI space are well documented. Now we think it is truly disruptive innovation's time to shine in the market.

I feel as though a rubber band has been stretching for the last 4 years, and it let go with the election of Donald Trump. That's when truly disruptive innovation started to shine, and the stock market started to broaden out from the very concentrated Magnificent 6 strategies into much more widespread disruptive innovation. In other words, risk appetite and time horizon are starting to extend here.

I think the tax package, especially the corporate tax cuts, which most people haven't focused on—full depreciation of structures in the first year they're put in service, full expensing of equipment, R&D domestically, and software in year 1—provides huge incentives to invest now. I think that's exactly what's going to happen.

You can see the difference here. Truly disruptive innovation, we would expect, during the next 5 years will deliver a compound annual rate of return of roughly 50%. We've had some of that already, so maybe it's a 40% to 45% compound annual rate of change. This is in the public equity world. In the private world, just wait until you see what that discloses.

Thank you so much for coming. I know you're very busy.

My pleasure.

You're projecting that in 5 years, Bitcoin hits $3.8 million per coin. That's 5 times the market cap of gold, which has hit an all-time high. Walk us through the math here.

I'm going to correct that a bit.

Okay.

Our official bull case is $1.5 million.

Okay.

What got us to $3.8 million is using modern portfolio theory. If we were to include Bitcoin in portfolios at its optimal weight, maximizing the Sharpe ratio, that would have provided that increment to $3.8 million.

Believe it or not, that position size, when we did that analysis, was 19% of a diversified portfolio.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

I have more in mine.

Well, you swing for the fences.

When your cousins—when civilians—ask you, "Hey, how much Bitcoin should I own?" what's the number you would say in private to a family member?

To a family member?

Yeah. You want to protect them. You're not saying, "Hey, we're swinging for the fences. This needs to be our home run."

I'll tell you what I've told my children for a long time now: average in. Average in every month—just average in—and then I would leave it to them in terms of their comfort factor.

Got it. Cathie, can I ask you about ARK?

ARK has the ability to be a vehicle for a lot of folks who are just living their normal day-to-day lives and want the answer to what is going to do well in the future. They can buy your ETFs, and then they can participate in that future.

There are a lot of people who are frustrated—palpably frustrated—with an inability to get ahead and break through and build wealth. First, what is economically happening in America that prevents so many people from doing that? What do you see? Second, what characteristics and responsibilities do retail investors have if they're going to YOLO this, buy this other thing, and try to go further out on the risk spectrum? What is their responsibility so that there's no crying in the casino?

There are many ways to access innovation. One of the ways, of course, is that we have packaged it up. We don't look anything like a traditional benchmark, so if they're diversifying, we're a very good source of diversification, especially for trying to get exposure to innovation.

We also have a venture fund. One of the questions I get regularly from retail investors used to be, "Why can't we access the private markets? We know more about those technologies than most of the institutions who are buying them. They have no idea. We're passionate about it."

So we've gotten more vocal, and this administration is certainly becoming more vocal, more focused on this particular idea, because it is un-American, right, to say you have to meet this price.

Well, you use ChatGPT every day, but you can't buy OpenAI.

Exactly.

But you can buy a lottery ticket, or you can bet on sports.

And it makes no sense. I do think it's going to change, and I think this administration—

How should it change? Should we just have—and I've advocated for this before on the pod, and I believe you've talked about it—5% or 6% of the country are accredited, and you've got a small number who are qualified purchasers. Should we just have a test? You get a license to own a gun, drive a car, or cut hair in this country. Why not just have a simple accreditation test? You understand diversification, you understand private versus public assets, and you know how to read a balance sheet. Wouldn't that just solve the problem right quick?

I mean, I used to say that what we're doing in the investment world right now would be the equivalent of saying you can't drive because you don't make enough money or you do not have enough net worth.

Take a test.

Take a test. And we have this big question in the country about polarization of wealth. 50–60% of the country has some exposure to equities, but the people who don't tend toward socialism or handouts. Maybe they don't feel they're part of what we experience, which is that we meet great founders, and you get to do public and private, and we get to say—

“Yeah, I drove in an FSD car when Tesla was private, or whatever it is, and I looked at Coinbase when it was private, or Uber. Yeah, I got the sense that I want to put 1 or 2% into that.”

Yes.

Yeah. It does feel profoundly unfair, doesn't it?

Yes. Yes.

Cathie, there's a lot of market signals right now that are flashing green. There's a lot of market signals that are flashing red. Do you feel that you have to position actively to all of those things, or do you say, “You know what? I can't control this. I need to look 5 years out”? So how do you manage the risk, and how do you view the markets today?

Yes. The risk question obviously comes up a lot because our portfolios are volatile. They don't look like the benchmarks. When markets get into a bearish period, investors tend to hug their benchmarks, and we're moving in the opposite direction.

So I just want to say, we do what we do, and that's what our advisers expect. They don't expect us to raise cash or do anything. They might; that's their decision, right? In terms of what we do to control risk during bear markets, we will concentrate toward our highest-conviction names.

We have a scoring system based on management, execution, moat or barriers to entry, product, service, leadership, valuation—importantly—and thesis risk. With those scores, we concentrate during bull markets, which I do believe we are in. It's a bull market that's broadening out. We tend to diversify because the IPOs start appearing again, and we have more information on some of the companies we've sold during the bear market.

Give us the read on Elon's trillion-dollar pay package.

You know what's so interesting about it? This happened with the first model we put out. We put out a model once a year of Tesla, with our price target 5 years out. We looked at his first package and we said, “That looks like our model.” We looked at this one, and we said, “That looks like our model.” And our model is—

Your 10-year forecast has Tesla at $8.5 trillion.

Well, right. We put it out there 5 years out. Yeah, yeah. So I think if he delivers on humanoid robots the way he thinks he is, we don't have enough in there. Our price target is $2,600. I think it's at $330 today, something like that.

Exactly.

Yeah, $2,600. And we have very little for humanoid in there. But what Elon is capitalizing on is this convergence that I mentioned: robotics, energy storage, and AI. That convergence in the robotaxi space is pretty much the same convergence in the humanoid robot space.

Do you underwrite compensation as part of your model? When you look at a package like that, if you compare it to other CEOs—Zuck or whomever—different styles of compensation, Bezos famously took no compensation post-IPO, how do you think about that as a motivating factor or a necessary condition in 2025 to get results?

I think it's huge. I wish more CEOs would do this. Elon's not going to be paid unless he reaches these milestones, either. So I think it's very motivating to him. I think it's also an incentive to shoot for the stars, but do it in a very first-principles way.

Everything's physics-based, and everything's milestone-based. And he's very disciplined. If people do not know that, they should. When a milestone misses, he's in there on the floor.

Final quick question. As a stock picker, do you care where the companies are incorporated? Do you look at Delaware now and say, “There's fundamental business risk,” and/or do you cajole these folks now to maybe reincorporate in different places?

We're not an activist investor. I have to be very careful and say that we are moving out of Delaware.

You, as your own business, why? You don't trust them to be predictable? Is that the issue? They're not predictable now, and they're activist.

Activist. It's—

In a bizarre way.

What business do they have overriding the shareholders of Tesla when it comes to a pay package? And all those shareholders who did that drive-by lawsuit—

Twice. They did it twice.

Yes.

I mean, it's unbelievable. That guy owned 10 shares. He did a 20-bagger, and then he's got the right to take away. It's like JCal suing Uber.

You're amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to see you all. Thank you.

Cathie Wood, thank you so much for sharing so much knowledge.