Don’t want to invest in Elon Musk? Two new ETFs explicitly exclude him

In the lead up to the SpaceX IPO, there were dozens of stories about early employees and investors who stood to make millions of dollars for betting on, or working for, Elon Musk.

But thanks to Musk’s work with DOGE, his public comments on X, and the infamous gesture he made at Donald Trump’s inauguration that looked a lot like a Nazi salute, someone realized there was money to be made by avoiding him.

An exchanged-traded fund creator with the appropo name of Subversive Capital has found a way to tap into that negative sentiment with two new anti-Elon exchanged-traded funds.

The ETFs, which are similar to mutual funds, except they are traded like regular stocks, are legally registered by Tidal Trust I and attached to a brand called Subversive Markets Lab LLC. (Bloomberg was the first to spot the filing.)

Avoiding the world’s richest person can be tricky for the average investor, who likely puts their money into mutual funds tied to indices like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. SpaceX, which is in the FTSE Russell and MSCI indexes, was recently added to the Nasdaq 100. That means it’s included in funds that track those indexes. Musk’s other publicly traded company, Tesla, is a longtime favorite of mutual funds, especially the large cap and growth varieties.

The two newly registered ETFs, named Nasdaq-100 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF and S&P 500 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF, are designed to block these companies. As of the date of the prospectus, the excluded enterprises are Tesla (TSLA) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX), the filing states. Musk’s other companies, including Neuralink and The Boring Company are not publicly traded.

It is possible that the Ex-Elon funds may exclude other companies that become closely associated with the near-trillionaire, too. The Ex-Elon funds seek “to provide capital appreciation through exposure to a broad universe of large-capitalization U.S. equity securities, while excluding the equity securities of companies that are founded, controlled, or led by Elon Musk, or with which Mr. Musk is otherwise primarily associated,” so the document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reads. 

While these are legit funds that investors will soon be able to trade, there’s also more than a bit of tongue and cheek going on. Prior to the Ex-Elon funds, Subversive earned headlines for its other ETFs that promise to let regular folks “invest like the oligarchy.” One of those funds holds stocks known to be traded by Democratic members of Congress and their spouses, and the other mirrors those held by the Republican side of the aisle.  

It’s too early to say if investors will pile into these Ex-Elon ETFs, which have the tickers QQNE and SPNE, or if they will perform better than funds that include Musk’s companies. But they do reflect a growing appetite for ways to avoid Musk, and, given his famed hostility to traders who shorted Tesla, perhaps even annoy him a little.