Cathie Wood

Peter said the Tesla-SpaceX merger could be announced this year, and Cathie said ARK believes it will happen. The proposed combination would span rockets, broadband, AI, electric cars, robotaxis, humanoids and energy. Mars remains Musk’s destination, with profitable connectivity and orbital data centers as steps along the way; his wager is that the AI leader will have “the greatest computing power and the lowest cost.” China is a major obstacle, given Tesla’s exposure there and Musk’s defense work.

Nikhil Chandhok predicts that AI agents will outnumber humans next year and become genuine economic entities later this decade. A persistent orchestrator could command thousands of temporary subagents, creating a need for identity, provenance, liability and incentives: “Prove to me that you did what you claim you do.” Arc is already testing agent credit by lending 25 cents and increasing limits after repayment.

Stablecoins are positioned as machine-native money, but transaction capacity remains the gating infrastructure. Nikhil cited more than $100 trillion of USDC settlement across over 30 public blockchains and nearly $1 trillion issued and redeemed; unlike cards, whose merchants wait three to five days, stablecoins enable near-instant payments. Arc’s institutional design targets payment finality, known validators and privacy. The chain is described as handling tens of thousands of transactions per second, but an agent economy may eventually require millions: “Agents acting without making transactions is not real economic activity. It’s just noise.”

As machines become abundant, Peter argued that human experience may become the scarce, more valuable product. Nikhil expects developer platforms to become agent-facing within 9–12 months: users will stop asking coding agents which tool to choose and simply say, “Please do this.” The next step could be AI-operated corporations, internet-native financing and hybrid human-machine communities that create their own meaning.

Cathie calls AI-enabled healthcare the market’s most underrated convergence, while keeping a longer clock on humanoid robots. She described each person as a data factory of 35–40 trillion cells and corrected herself to 3 billion DNA base pairs; Moderna’s move made sense if its apparently approved product is truly a cancer vaccine. ARK estimates humanoids are 200,000 times more complex than robotaxis and pushes Musk’s late-2028–2029 scaling timeline back “a couple of years.”

The adoption battle is increasingly political: Peter cited 80% of Americans fearing AI and 73% opposing nearby data centers, while roughly 80% in China support them. Cathie argued that data centers can eventually reduce energy costs and that nuclear restrictions left US electricity prices potentially twice as high as they otherwise might have been. She said AI should make housing, education and healthcare more accessible. Cathie allowed for entry-level displacement but expects a labor shortage; Peter called technology a net job creator.

Tokenization supports Cathie’s dollar-bullish view, while stablecoins have altered—but not broken—ARK’s $1 million Bitcoin thesis. Nikhil argued that USDC exports dollars, 24/7 markets release capital, and roughly $3 trillion is currently tied up in cross-border settlement. Cathie said stablecoins took the transactional role ARK once expected Bitcoin to fill, but Bitcoin retains its internet-native monetary role, private rules-based global monetary system and low-correlation asset status; ARK has not changed its forecast.