November 26, 2021: -On Wednesday, Closely watched money manager Cathie Wood told CNBC that Apple could have owned the driverless vehicle market by purchasing Tesla when given a chance during the electric vehicle maker’s troubled Model 3 ramp-up.

“We’ve been overseeing Apple for years now. Because what is an autonomous vehicle? It’s the mobile device,” she said in a wide-ranging, in which also she talked about her Ark Invest strategies, the returns she expects long-term, and buying Zoom on its recent drop.

Apple is sharing hit all-time highs last Friday and then again Monday following the previous week’s Bloomberg report about the tech giant accelerating efforts to launch a self-driving vehicle.

“This is arduous work, and with all the management turnover, we would be surprised if they’re able to pull it off that quickly,” Wood said, which referred to a Bloomberg report in June about the departures at Apple’s autonomous unit of three top managers. In 2018, Apple lured Doug Field, then Tesla’s senior VP of engineering, back to the company where he had worked before, and apple also hired myriad other former Tesla employees.

Wood, a longtime Tesla uber-bull and shareholder and believer in CEO Elon Musk, told CNBC, “This should have been Apple’s market, and Apple should have bought Tesla when they were given the opportunity. We’re happy they didn’t.”

Musk revealed, in a tweet in December 2020, that reaching out to Apple CEO Tim Cook “in the darkest days for the Model 3 program” about the possibility of selling Tesla.” Musk said Cook “refused to take the meeting.”

The first Model 3s, an expensive EV sedan aiming at mass-market car buyers, were delivered in 2017, after raising production to meet demand was problematic. In 2018, Musk tweets that the car business was “hell” and that he was sleeping at the factory to solve the problems.

Fast-forward to today, Tesla is joining the $1 trillion market cap club, and Musk, the largest shareholder in the EV company, sells billions of dollars of his stock holdings.

Wood told CNBC she sees “nothing wrong” with Musk selling stock, taking profits, and paying the billions of dollars in tax bills related to stock option grants.

On Tuesday, Regulatory filings showed that Musk exercised options to buy 2.15 million shares of Tesla and sold 934,091 shares worth over $1 billion. Since his Twitter poll on November 6, asking whether he should sell the stock, Musk has 9.2 million shares worth $9.9 billion.