Tesla brand value shed $15 billion in 2024 with aging lineup, Musk at helm, researchers found
New Tesla cars are displayed at a Tesla dealership on December 20, 2024 in Corte Madera, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
The value of Tesla’s brand fell by 26% in 2024, a second straight annual decline, with factors including an aging lineup of vehicles, and CEO Elon Musk’s “antagonism,” according to research and consulting firm Brand Finance.
Tesla’s brand value now stands at an estimated $43 billion, down from $58.3 billion at the beginning of 2024 and $66.2 billion at the start of 2023, the firm said in its annual ranking. Toyota is the most valuable brand in autos at $64.7 billion, with Mercedes close behind at $53 billion, the researchers found.
Brand Finance, based in London, conducts comprehensive consumer surveys and analyzes thousands of companies’ financials, looking at revenue, licensing agreements, margins and more, to estimate the monetary value of brands. The assessments include corporate brands and the sub-brands associated with individual product lines.
As part of the firm’s ranking this year, Brand Finance analyzed answers from about 175,000 survey respondents worldwide, including about 16,000 people who shared their views on Tesla.
The results show that the way consumers view Tesla is very different from Wall Street’s assessment.
Tesla’s stock price soared 63% last year, reaching a record in December, after investors snapped up the shares following Donald Trump’s election victory the prior month. Musk contributed $277 million to help propel Trump and other Republican candidates to victory, and is poised to wield influence in the administration to the benefit of his companies.
When it comes to the broader public, Brand Finance CEO David Haigh says that Musk’s political rhetoric and public persona has its downsides.
“There are people who think he’s wonderful, but many that don’t,” Haigh said. “If you are buying electric vehicles, his persona is highly likely to impact your view of whether or not you want to buy one of his company’s cars, but that’s only one of many factors.”
On key measures like “consideration,” “reputation” and “recommendation,” Tesla’s scores declined across the board in major markets where it operates factories and sells its cars — the U.S., Europe and Asia, Brand Finance found.
Elon Musk walks on Capitol Hill on the day of a meeting with Senate Republican Leader-elect John Thune (R-SD), in Washington, U.S. December 5, 2024.
Benoit Tessier | Reuters
A consideration score shows whether people would consider buying from a brand. A reputation score shows how highly respondents regard a brand on average on a scale from 1 to 10. And a recommendation score indicates whether or not people are likely to speak favorably about a brand.
Tesla saw significant declines in its scores in Europe, where its consideration score dropped from 21% to 16% on average from 2024 to 2025.
Competitors Mercedes and BYD beat Tesla especially on consideration and recommendation scores outside the U.S.
Tesla maintained a high loyalty score of 90% in the U.S., however. That means customers who already owned a Tesla vehicle were likely to keep driving it over the next 12 months. But Tesla’s recommendation score in the U.S. dropped from 8.2 out of 10 to 4.3.
Haigh said Tesla’s declining scores and brand value are a sign that the company’s “pulling power is weakening.” There’s a risk, he said, that “Tesla won’t be able to sell so many products, and it won’t be able to sell at such high prices as it did before.”
There were troubling signs already. Tesla’s deliveries for 2024 declined by about 1% to 1.79 million, even though demand for battery electric vehicles increased worldwide. In the U.S. Tesla’s, market share in EVs dropped to 49% from 55% a year earlier, according to data from Cox Automotive.
Tesla’s brand strength index score, according to Brand Finance, has also dipped from just over 80 to just under 65. The score indicates how well a brand is doing compared to competitors on intangible measures.
“Unless Tesla can come up with a whole range of new products that will really excite consumers, and unless they can mitigate some of the antagonism caused by their leader, they will be seen as past their peak and will begin to go down,” Haigh said.
Measuring Musk
Musk hasn’t limited his political activity to the U.S. He has reportedly been in regular contact with with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, has praised and worked with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s Javier Milei and made public appearances with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
He recently endorsed Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and pressured British officials to release anti-immigrant Tommy Robinson, a convicted fraudster with a violent criminal record, from prison.
On Monday, during his public remarks after Trump’s inauguration, Musk repeatedly used a gesture that historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose work focuses on fascism, described as “a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one.” Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment.
When it comes to consumer attitudes, “There’ll be a small number that say, I really don’t care what they do. I just want their product,” said Haigh. “There are other gradations of people who care, right through to those who say, I’m not touching that product on principle.”
Tesla is unique in the tight association between the company’s brand and its leader.
With Tesla, “It is very clear who the CEO is, that this person is in charge and their behavior will impact the company’s reputation,” Haigh said.
Brand Finance also evaluated other Musk-led brands, including X, aerospace and defense contractor SpaceX and, for the first time, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet business.
The overall brand value of X dropped 26% to $498 million from $673 million, the firm estimated. Simple awareness of the X brand dropped from 2022, when the company was still known as Twitter, from 94% to 78% today on an international level. Before Musk took over and renamed it, Twitter had a brand value of $5.7 billion in 2022.
The name change drove part of the overall decline, according to Brand Finance, but so did the loss of users, advertisers and ad revenue.
“Twitter was very well known, very well-liked and attracted a lot of advertising,” Haigh said. “Overnight, when he changed it to X, according to our data, that reduced the value by about 75%. It went right down and has continued to go down.”
For SpaceX, which Brand Finance began to assess at the start of 2024, the company’s brand value has increased 11% to $3.8 billion. About 45% of people in the U.S. who responded to the survey were familiar with SpaceX, a high ranking for an aerospace and defense company.
The Starlink brand, calculated separately from SpaceX, is valued at $2.4 billion, the firm found. That number is expected to increase as the company continues to add new users and show consistently higher revenue from monthly subscribers.
Brand Finance will publish its Global 500 2025 study of the world’s most valuable brands on Tuesday at Davos.
WATCH: Why Bank of America downgraded Tesla
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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