Cathie Wood Sells Nvidia for AMD in Q1 — Trims Tesla Stake After Hailing Musk as 'Thomas Edison of Our Age'

Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood is popular for her contrarian bets across disruptive industries spanning AI, space exploration, cryptocurrency, and genome development. She gained prominence when Ark ETFs surged in value by over 100% during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, outpacing broad market indices considerably.

In Q1, she made considerable changes to Ark's portfolio, with some of the trades standing out. She slashed her firm's stake in Nvidia by 17.4% or around 219,000 shares in the latest quarter. This is despite Nvidia posting record-breaking fiscal Q1 results, assuaging fears of an AI bubble.

Simultaneously, Ark Invest ramped up its stake in Nvidia's rival Advanced Micro Devices by 5.3% or nearly 138,000 shares during the quarter. Some experts continue to prefer AMD over Nvidia for higher potential stock gains due to faster rate of change and its lead in capturing cloud-provider supply diversification. However, Nvidia dominates in AI training and offers long-term safety for investors.

Wood's Conflicting Tesla Moves

Wood also continued to sell Tesla shares for the second consecutive quarter despite sharing an extremely bullish view on the stock and Musk's AI roadmap. Ark Invest sold around 83,200 shares of Tesla in Q1, but the stock remains the top holding in its portfolio.

In late December, Wood had said Musk was like the Thomas Edison of our age. 'I think he's a very good person. If I had to say one thing, he wants to do the right thing,' she mentioned in an interview that was reposted on X by Musk himself. She had also fiercely defended Musk's $1 trillion pay package and even predicted that Tesla's stock price could increase to $2,600 per share within five years.

Around the same time, Michael Burry had described Tesla shares as 'ridiculously overvalued,' while pointing out that Tesla dilutes its stock by around 3.6% every year but has yet to implement share repurchases to offset this dilution. He described this as the 'tragic algebra' of stock-based compensation.

Burry also commented on Tesla's frequent pivots across various tech sectors. 'As an aside, the Elon cult was all-in on electric cars until competition showed up, then all-in on autonomous driving until competition showed up, and now is all-in on robots — until competition shows up,' he had explained.

Pressure on Stock Mounts After Morgan Stanley Downgrade

Morgan Stanley's Andrew Percoco had also downgraded the Tesla stock to 'equalweight' from an 'overweight' rating before the end of 2025, which pressured the stock price into shedding 7.2% in value year-to-date.

Morgan Stanley's Andrew Percoco had also downgraded the Tesla stock to 'equalweight' from an 'overweight' rating before the end of 2025. The brokerage believed that Tesla would keep advancing key initiatives, particularly in full self-driving and robotic technology, but had cautioned that investors should wait for a better entry point as the stock price was highly valued amid risks of more headwinds due to stiff competition, regulatory hurdles, and declining global vehicle sales.

'This [downgrade] is a reflection of lower volume expectations, with a 10.5% reduction in 2026 volumes and an 18.5% reduction in cumulative deliveries through 2040 due to our more cautious view on the pace of EV adoption in the US coupled with growing competition in global markets,' the analyst had noted.

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