- Cathie Wood voiced support for
Tesla shares following a recent selloff, according to a Bloomberg report. - Tesla's stock price tumbled following Elon Musk's Twitter poll asking if he should sell shares in the EV maker.
Star stockpicker Cathie Wood remained a proponent of Tesla stock in the face of the EV maker's recent rout, according to a Bloomberg report.
Tesla's stock price dropped 20% through Wednesday's session from last Friday, the day before CEO Elon Musk ran a Twitter poll asking his followers whether he should sell 10% of his shares in the electric auto maker. Most poll voters favored a sale.
The selloff erased more than $200 billion from the company's market value, though
"Of course the momentum players turned tail as soon as the stock reacted to that news and followed it down," Wood told Bloomberg on Wednesday at the Dynasty Financial Partners' 2021 Investments Forum being held in Nashville, Tennessee. "For us, we have been taking profits on the way up and receiving a lot of criticism for it, and for us this is nothing but a blip."
In March, Wood's Ark Invest set a 2025 price target of $3,000 for Tesla stock, foreseeing sales of 5 million-10 million vehicles in 2025 and by a launch of a fully autonomous robo-taxi fleet.
Tesla is the largest holding in Wood's flagship Ark Innovation ETF, or ARKK, with a 10.5% weighting as of November 10. The fund did sell shares of Tesla for three straight sessions last week through November 4, ahead of Musk posting his Twitter poll.
Wood also said that Musk, who faces a big tax bill on stock options, may have felt an obligation to run the public poll, according to the Bloomberg report.
"He has been on the record as saying 'I was the first in and I'm going to be the last out,'" Wood said. "And yet he has an enormous tax bill related to stock options. I am sure he didn't want to use any more of his stock as collateral for loans. So I think that's sensible."
Musk on Monday exercised 2.15 million stock options at a price of $6.24 each, for a total cost of $13.4 billion. He then sold 934,000 shares at varying prices, generating more than $1.1 billion from the sales.