New 'Ex-Elon' ETFs Show How Central Tesla and SpaceX Are

NEW YORK — A pair of newly registered exchange-traded funds designed to exclude Elon Musk's companies has inadvertently delivered one of the clearest signals yet of how central Tesla and SpaceX have become to the American stock market. To build a fund that avoids them, the issuer had to engineer them out on purpose, because ordinary index funds simply cannot.

Funds Built to Exclude Two Giants

The two ETFs, filed by Subversive Markets Lab and registered through Tidal Trust I, are named the Nasdaq-100 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF and the S&P 500 Ex-Elon Enterprises ETF, trading under the tickers QQNE and SPNE. As of their prospectus, the specifically excluded companies are Tesla (TSLA) and Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX). Musk's other ventures, Neuralink and The Boring Company, remain private and outside any index.

The premise only works because both companies are now everywhere. SpaceX was recently added to the Nasdaq-100 and sits in the FTSE Russell and MSCI indexes, while Tesla has been a fixture of large-cap and growth funds for years. Any investor holding a standard S&P 500 or Nasdaq-100 tracker already owns a slice of both, a reality reinforced by SpaceX's historic inclusion in the Nasdaq-100.

A Backhanded Compliment

Stripping the two companies out of a broad index is not a trivial exercise. Both rank among the most valuable and heavily traded names in the market, and their weightings ripple through the largest passive funds in the world. The very existence of an "ex-Elon" product is, in effect, an acknowledgment that Musk's companies have become load-bearing pillars of U.S. equities, so dominant that avoiding them requires a custom-built fund. That dominance is on display in the automaker's core business, where Tesla continues to lead the U.S. EV market through the first half of 2026.

For long-term shareholders, the takeaway is flattering. A company only becomes something an index fund cannot escape after years of compounding scale, and both Tesla and the newly public SpaceX have reached that status. The niche funds are likely to remain a curiosity rather than a threat; the far bigger story is the pool of passive capital that flows toward Musk's companies precisely because they are index staples.

The Bigger Picture

The filings arrive during a remarkable stretch for Musk's empire, with SpaceX freshly public, Tesla pressing ahead on robotaxis and new vehicles, and both names commanding heavy investor attention. As first reported by TechCrunch, the funds are still working their way through registration and it is too early to know whether they will attract meaningful assets.

What is already clear is the underlying math. When a fund's selling point is the absence of two specific stocks, those two stocks have effectively become synonymous with the market itself. For Tesla and SpaceX, being the companies everyone else has to work around is a position most businesses would envy, and a milestone that speaks to just how far Musk's ventures have climbed.