Cathie Wood Sells $34.5M In Twitter Amid Elon Musk's Criticism Of NFT Feature, Loads Up On The Dip In This Crypto Stock Instead

Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management on Friday sold more shares in Twitter Inc TWTR, further lowering its exposure in the microblogging site since the start of the year, in a sharp departure from a month ago when it had piled up over a million shares in the San Francisco, California-based company.

The St. Petersburg, Florida-based Ark Invest sold 990,479 Twitter shares — estimated to be worth $34.5 million based on Friday’s closing.

Twitter stock closed 6.6% lower at $34.8 a share on Friday. The stock is down 18.4% year-to-date.

Three Ark ETFs — the Ark Innovation ETF ARKK, the Ark Next Generation Internet ETF ARKW, and the Ark Fintech Innovation ETF ARKF— own shares in Twitter.

Ark held 12.6 million shares — worth $469.9 million — in Twitter, prior to Friday’s trade via three of its active ETFs.

See Also: Jack Dorsey Effect? Cathie Wood Makes Massive Sales In Twitter In First 2 Days Of 2022

Based on the shares that it held, Ark Invest lowered its exposure in Twitter by an estimated 7.8% on Friday.

The popular money managing firm has sold 3.33 million shares in three trades on Twitter so far this month.

The latest sale in Twitter by Ark coincides with the social media company announcing verified non fungible token profile pictures.

The move seemed to have found popularity with a large number of users but also faced high-profile criticism from the likes of Tesla Inc. TSLA CEO Elon Musk over concerns related to prioritization of valuable engineering resources at a time when the platform is rifed with cryptocurrency scams.

Twitter also made some key leadership changes last week, a first after co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as chief executive in November, leaving the company veteran Parag Agrawal as CEO.

Ark also bought 70,733 shares — estimated to be worth $13.5 million — in Coinbase Global Inc COIN on the dip on Friday. Coinbase was among the cryptocurrency-related stocks that sank on Friday.

Shares of the cryptocurrency exchange closed 13.4% lower at $191.97 a share on Friday. Ark Invest has been piling up shares in cryptocurrency-related fintech stocks that deal in Bitcoin BTC/USD Ethereum ETH/USD, Dogecoin DOGE/USD and others.