Cathie Wood said she currently owns more than $7 million worth of bitcoin, which she bought on the advice of Reagan-era economist Arthur Laffer when it was trading at $250.

The CEO of ARK Investment Management shared the information last week in a podcast interview called What Bitcoin Did with Peter McCormack. He added that he had invested $100,000 in bitcoin, which is now worth more than $7 million.

Although Wood did not reveal the year, he bought the cryptocurrencythe amount it was trading at when he bought it suggests it was sometime in 2015.

He also added that he has not sold any of that initial investment.

Laffer was Wood’s professor at the University of Southern California, who had asked him to take an interest in Bitcoin.

Laffer told him that Bitcoin was a rules-based monetary system and that he had been looking for it “ever since we came off the gold standard.”

Asked by Wood how big Bitcoin could get, Laffer responded, “How big is the US monetary base?” Around that year, Bitcoin’s market capitalization was around $6 billion and the US monetary base was $4.5 trillion.

When calculated on the current price of around $19,250, Wood made a whopping profit of over $7.6 million on his $1,000,000 investment.

However, he has not been able to find the same level of success with his company, which he co-founded, as until recently they have not been able to use ARK funds other than investing in securities.

ARK Investment Management focuses on innovative and disruptive investments. The company’s value rose during the 2020 stock market boom, with its investments in unprofitable technology companies bearing lucrative fruits, attracting a large amount of funds to its exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Although ETFs are limited to investing in securities, Ark began exploring ways to invest in bitcoin through products like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, eventually adding them to various funds.

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