New ‘Ex-Elon’ ETFs let investors track the market while skipping Musk’s companies

An investment firm is offering a way to invest in the broad market without owning Elon Musk’s companies. New York-based Subversive ETFs has filed with the SEC for two “Ex-Elon” funds, Bloomberg reports.

One fund tracks the Nasdaq-100 and the other the S&P 500. Both exclude any company “founded, controlled or led by” Musk.

The products are the Nasdaq-100 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF and the S&P 500 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF, ticker symbols QQNE and SPNE. Filings point to a launch around 21 September.

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For now, the exclusions mean no Tesla and no SpaceX. Other Musk ventures, like Neuralink and the Boring Company, are not publicly traded, and the screen could extend to OpenAI, which Musk co-founded, if it ever lists.

The funds are actively managed and aim to hold at least 80% of their assets in their index minus the excluded names. Active management typically carries higher fees than a plain index tracker.

Why a fund to avoid one man

The direct trigger was SpaceX joining the Nasdaq-100. A rule change fast-tracking mega-cap listings meant the newly public rocket firm entered major indexes quickly, pulling it into the funds that track them.

That forces passive investors to hold SpaceX whether they want to or not. Analysts have flagged that hundreds of billions in index-tracking assets were set to buy the stock automatically, a dynamic critics call a wealth transfer toward existing shareholders.

Not everyone wants that exposure. Some object to SpaceX’s governance, where Musk keeps dominant voting control, while others question its valuation, and a Danish pension fund has already blacklisted it.

Conviction has a cost

Screening out a company is not free, and that cuts both ways. SpaceX slipped nearly 7% on its first day in the Nasdaq-100, which would have spared Ex-Elon holders the drop.

But excluding a stock also means forgoing its gains, and Musk’s firms have created enormous wealth for early backers. An investor betting against them is making an active call, not a neutral one.

The funds also sit in a small but growing niche of values- and politics-driven investing. Whether many savers actually route money through a single-person exclusion screen is the open question these tickers will answer.

For now, the pitch is simple, and narrow. If you want the index without one particular founder, there is finally a box to tick.