Executives at Meta stand to get bigger bonuses this year. 

The company said in a corporate filing Thursday that it had approved “an increase in the target bonus percentage” for its annual bonus plan for executives. Meta’s named executive officers could earn a bonus of 200% of their base salary under the new plan, up from the 75% they earned previously, according to the filing. 

The updated bonus plan doesn’t apply to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the filing noted.

A committee for Meta’s board of directors approved the change on Feb.13 after determining that the “target total cash compensation” for its executives “was at or below the 15th percentile of the target total cash compensation of executives holding similar positions” at peer companies. 

“Following this increase, the target total cash compensation for the named executive officers (other than the CEO) falls at approximately the 50th percentile of the Peer Group Target Cash Compensation,” the filing said.

The disclosure of the new executive bonus plan comes a week after Meta began laying off 5% of its overall workforce. The company had previously said this would impact its lowest performers.

Meta also slashed its annual distribution of stock options by about 10% for thousands of employees, according to a report published Thursday by the Financial Times. The report noted that the stock option reduction may differ based on where the workers live and their position at the company.

Meta shares are up more than 47% over the past year and closed Thursday at $694.84, underscoring investor enthusiasm over the social media company’s growing sales in the digital advertising market and the potential for its artificial intelligence investments to eventually generate big returns.

The company said in January that its fourth-quarter revenue grew 21% year over year to $48.39 billion.

Meta did not reply to a request for comment.

The largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange said Friday that the Securities and Exchange Commission would drop its lawsuit against it, a signal that the Trump administration plans to take a friendlier approach to the broader crypto industry.

In a release it titled ‘Righting a major wrong,’ the exchange, Coinbase, said SEC staff had agreed in principle to dismiss a suit filed during the Biden administration. The suit accused Coinbase of acting as an unregistered securities broker.

The agency must still vote to formally drop the suit.

A representative for the SEC declined to comment on Coinbase’s announcement. 

‘I think it is a really important signal that a small group of activists in the prior administration who tried to unlawfully attack this industry — we are able to turn page on that and finally get regulatory clarity in America,’ Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in an interview on CNBC on Friday morning.

Coinbase shares were up 5% in premarket trading. Bitcoin prices were up 1%.

The move to drop the suit would serve to make good on President Donald Trump’s campaign commitment to roll back the strict enforcement of the crypto industry that occurred under then-President Joe Biden. Trump has promised to make the United States the ‘crypto capital of the world,’ and has launched his own meme coin.

In its original suit, the SEC said Coinbase’s alleged actions were depriving investors of ‘critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosure, safeguards against conflicts of interest, and routine inspection by the SEC.’

“You simply can’t ignore the rules because you don’t like them or because you’d prefer different ones: the consequences for the investing public are far too great,” Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said at the time.

To date, the SEC has not categorized bitcoin as a security. The crypto industry has long complained that, under former Chair Gary Gensler, the agency took an overly critical posture toward the industry while failing to provide clear ‘rules of the road’ and work with it to develop a means for it to operate legally.

Lawsuits against two other exchanges, Binance and Kraken, are still pending.

‘We tried to ‘come in and register’ but it turned out it was a fake offer, as every crypto company discovered,’ Armstrong wrote in a separate post on X on Friday, referring to the Biden administration’s previous actions concerning the crypto industry.

‘Regulators are supposed to enforce the law, but they can’t make up new laws on the spot if they don’t like the current ones, or weaponize a lack of clarity in the law.’

In an attempt to court younger audiences, Disney’s ESPN is planning to add some user-generated content to its yet-to-be-named flagship streaming service, which will debut later this year.

While the details are still unclear, ESPN will allow subscribers to post their own content at some point in the application’s evolution, according to people familiar with the matter. The technology likely won’t be available at launch, which the company hopes will occur before the National Football League season begins in September. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment.

Disney executives have also considered adding user-generated content to Disney+ and discuss YouTube’s influence on streaming on a near daily basis, CNBC reported last year.

Alphabet’s YouTube, which leans heavily on creator-led content, is the most popular streaming service with an 11.1% share of total TV usage in the U.S., according to Nielsen.

ESPN executives are targeting a price of either $25 per month or $30 per month for the ESPN streaming service, which will include all of ESPN’s linear programming plus other digital add-ons, the people said.

The company plans to announce a name for the service, a price and a launch date in the coming months, the people said.

Media and professional sports league executives are focusing on how to capture the attention of younger viewers that are opting to watch YouTube or TikTok over live games. ESPN spends tens of billions of dollars each year on the media rights for live sports.

Airbus could prioritize deliveries to its non-U.S. customers if tariffs disrupt the European plane maker’s imports stateside, CEO Guillaume Faury said Thursday.

“We have a large demand from the rest of the world, so [if] we face very significant difficulties to deliver to the U.S., we can also adapt by bringing forward deliveries to other customers which are very eager to get planes,” Faury told CNBC’s Charlotte Reed, in an interview discussing the company’s full-year results.

“Those tariffs are looming, and we don’t know what they will be, [and], if and when we would have tariffs come in, what they would impact. So we stand ready to adapt accordingly,” Faury said, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging tariff threats which have already been ramped up against China.

Faury nevertheless stressed that Airbus had made moves in recent years to not only buy more from the U.S. and sell a significant number of aircraft and helicopters in the U.S., but also to base part of its production locally.

That includes a large output site in Mobile, Alabama, with two final assembly lines for the company’s A220 and A320 family jets, with another U.S. line under construction to build A320 and A321s for the domestic market.

A host of large U.S. carriers are Airbus customers, including American Airlines, Delta, United and JetBlue.

“So we have a lot of potential flexibilities,” Faury said regarding the potential imposition of duties, whose details remain uncertain.

“Bottom lime, we believe in this industry — that is very much a North Atlantic ecosystem with a lot of interdependencies — tariffs would hurt both sides. So I hope, I believe, we will not be significantly impacted by tariffs,” Faury said.

The European plane maker’s target for around 820 aircraft deliveries in 2025 was issued “in spite of those uncertainties, to clarify what we think we can deliver this year absent tariffs,” Faury said.

Airbus, meanwhile, remains stymied by a host of supply chain issues which are limiting its ability to ramp up production and work through its order backlog of more than 8,000 jets, Faury told CNBC.

His comments come after the company earlier on Thursday reported a 6% rise in annual revenue, but an 8% fall in adjusted operating profit to 5.35 billion euros ($5.59 billion) across 2024.

Profit at the company’s defense and space unit swung to a loss of 656 million euros for the full year.

Faury told CNBC that space was the “area where we are suffering,” amid competition from players such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and past investment in technologies that had proven difficult.

“We underestimated the risk compared to the reality,” Faury said, adding that the company was restructuring the unit and working to solve existing issues.

Despite challenges, Airbus’s annual results served to highlight its strength over its crisis-hit U.S. rival Boeing, which reported an annual loss of $11.83 billion for 2024.