Apple on Monday reaffirmed a commitment to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. over the coming years amid pressure from President Donald Trump and the growing threat of his tariffs

The tech giant said it planned to spend $500 billion over the next five years in the United States, with intentions to hire 20,000 new workers and produce AI servers.

The plans include a server factory in Houston slated to open in 2026 and a manufacturing academy in Detroit. The company also said data centers in Arizona, California, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington would see expansions from the investment plans.

Monday’s move is Apple’s latest splashy announcement about investing in the United States, making it an acceleration of existing plans.

The company announced in 2021 that it was planning to invest $430 billion domestically over the next five years. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Apple said it would make a $350 billion ‘contribution’ to the American economy over a stretch of five years, including the creation of 20,000 jobs.

Apple also confirmed Monday that an Arizona-based Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility, which began development under the Biden administration, had started producing chips for it there — news that media had previously reported.

Trump sought to take credit for the latest announcement — and seemed to tip it last week shortly after meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook and implied the trade duties he has threatened on a host of imports played a role.

“They don’t want to be in the tariffs,” Trump said last week, adding that Cook had halted plans to build two facilities in Mexico, an assertion Apple has not confirmed.

In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump cited ‘faith in what we are doing’ as the reason for Apple’s announcement.

In a note to investors, analysts at UBS cast some doubt about whether Apple can actually deploy $500 billion in the U.S. in the time frame it laid out, citing the company’s overwhelming reliance on suppliers outside the U.S. and the fact that it has historically lagged other large tech firms in making large capital expenditures.

‘While the headline figure on the surface is a large number, we believe it lacks substance at this juncture based on history,” the analysts wrote.

Apple’s playbook for avoiding tariffs appears to track closely with its strategy during the first Trump administration, when it allowed the president to take credit for a plant that had been making Mac computers in Texas for at least three years before he took office. Like other products Apple makes in the United States or says it intends to, the Mac made in Texas is not one of its mainstream models. Apple’s key revenue-generating products like the iPhone are all still manufactured outside of the country.

Apple and Cook have also gone a step further in Trump’s second term, both donating to Trump’s inauguration fund. Cook attended Trump’s swearing-in ceremony on Capitol Hill.

Apple said the new jobs it plans to hire for will be primarily related to research and development, engineering and AI. It also said it plans to expand investment in an existing advanced manufacturing fund.

“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” Cook said in a statement. “And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”

Apple shares were little changed in early Monday trading.

Starbucks will lay off 1,100 corporate employees and will not fill several hundred other open positions, the coffee chain’s CEO Brian Niccol said Monday.

The cuts will not affect workers at the company’s cafes.

In a message to corporate employees, Niccol said Starbucks is “simplifying our structure, removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams.”

“Our intent is to operate more efficiently, increase accountability, reduce complexity and drive better integration,” Niccol wrote. “All with the goal of being more focused and able to drive greater impact on our priorities.” 

The layoffs come as Starbucks tries to draw coffee drinkers back to its cafes after same-store sales declined for four straight quarters. As customers turn to cheaper rivals in Starbucks’ two largest markets, the U.S. and China, Niccol has tried to revamp operations since he took the helm of the company last year, including by speeding up service.

Starbucks had about 16,000 employees who work outside of store locations as of last year. The cuts will affect people who work in corporate support, but not roasting, manufacturing, warehousing and distribution.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is dropping its investigation into Robinhood’s crypto arm, the company revealed Monday.

Robinhood said it received a letter from the SEC’s enforcement division on Friday, detailing in a blog post that the agency has closed its investigation into the crypto business with no intention of moving forward with an enforcement action. The news comes three days after Coinbase similarly announced that the SEC has agreed to end its enforcement case against it.

Shares of Robinhood were last higher by about 1%.

In May 2024, Robinhood received a notice warning that it could be charged for potential violation of securities law within its crypto unit after previously being subpoenaed for its cryptocurrency listings, custody and platform operations — despite “years of good faith attempts to work with the SEC for regulatory clarity including our well-known attempt to ‘come in and register,’” Dan Gallagher, the company’s chief legal, compliance and corporate affairs officer, said at the time.

“Robinhood Crypto always has and will always respect federal securities laws and never allowed transactions in securities,” he said in a statement Monday. “We appreciate the formal closing of this investigation, and we are happy to see a return to the rule of law and commitment to fairness at the SEC.”

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

The SEC’s dismissal of the Robinhood and Coinbase cases is an early sign of the regulatory sea change for the crypto industry promised by President Donald Trump during his election campaign. Despite the meteoric rise of the price of bitcoin under the previous administration, many crypto businesses saw it as low point due to the SEC’s notorious regulation-by-enforcement approach to crypto — as opposed to the creation of clear rules by which to operate — under the leadership of then Chair Gary Gensler.

Nearly half of Robinhood’s $672 million transaction-based revenue in the fourth quarter came from a 700% rise in revenue tied to crypto trading, as bitcoin rallied toward $100,000 for the first time ever on hopes of more favorable policies under Trump.

The shares have gained 38% so far in 2025.

An “embarrassment of riches” at the box office could fuel a $1.2 billion year for IMAX, CEO Rich Gelfond told CNBC on Friday.

That volume would mark the best box office haul for the company, which specializes in high-resolution cameras, film formats, projectors and theaters.

“I think it’s going to be a very strong year,” Gelfond said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “The first thing that drives that is the slate.”

Gelfond pointed to several blockbuster titles slated for release in the next 10 months, including a new “Mission Impossible,” a live-action “How to Train Your Dragon” film, another “Jurassic Park” installment, a sequel to “Zootopia” and a third “Avatar” release.

Hollywood production issues led to fewer theatrical releases and smaller ticket sales in 2024, with box office receipts down 3.4% from 2023 to $8.74 billion. Already, the 2025 slate appears more robust, with more titles and bigger franchise films.

Aiding IMAX’s lofty box office goals is the Chinese title “Ne Zha 2,” which has already garnered $1.6 billion globally. It is the first film to have topped $1 billion in a single country. Gelfond noted that IMAX accounted for $135 million of the film’s total box office.

“We’ve done more box office in China in the first six weeks of this year than we did the whole year last year,” he said.

He added that “Ne Zha 2” is doing “like $100 million a day,” and that IMAX has accounted for around 13% of the film’s box office receipts.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is the distributor of “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Jurassic World Rebirth.”

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.’

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.

Amazon has dethroned Walmart in quarterly revenue for the first time ever.

Amazon said earlier this month that it brought in $187.8 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter. That beat Walmart’s sales for the period, which came in at $180.5 billion, the company reported on Thursday.

Since 2012, Walmart has held the distinction of being the top revenue generator each quarter, a title it gained after overtaking oil giant Exxon Mobil.

Walmart still leads the way in annual sales, though Amazon is gaining ground. Walmart is projected to reel in $708.7 billion in the fiscal year ahead while Amazon’s full-year revenue for 2025 is expected to reach $700.8 billion, according to FactSet.

Amazon’s core retail unit remains its biggest revenue generator, but its top line is also being fueled by its massive cloud computing, advertising and seller services businesses. Third-party seller services, which includes commissions and fees collected by Amazon on fulfillment and shipping, advertising and customer support, accounted for 24.5% of the company’s total sales last year. Amazon Web Services was responsible for nearly 17%.

Walmart has looked to its chief rival for ways to sustain sales growth. The company operates a third-party marketplace and offers sellers fulfillment services, although both businesses are a fraction of the size of Amazon’s. Walmart has also launched an advertising business and a loyalty program for shoppers, called Walmart+, that competes with Amazon Prime.

— CNBC’s Robert Hum contributed to this report.

Cameo wants workers back in the office more often, and it’s paying them each $10,000 to show up.

Starting this week, workers at the celebrity video-greeting app are reporting into the company’s Chicago headquarters Monday through Thursday. In exchange, the roughly two dozen eligible employees can expect a $10,000 annual raise, free lunch, free parking and access to an onsite gym.

″‘Roll out the red carpet’ is our first corporate value, and we really felt like we wanted to make HQ a perk, not a punishment,” Cameo CEO Steven Galanis tells CNBC Make It. “We know we’re asking more out of you to give up the flexibility, and we wanted to compensate you for it.”

Many workers say they’d take a pay cut to be able to keep working from home. Cameo is hoping the inverse will be true.

Galanis and his leadership team landed on a $10,000 annual raise because the sum is “meaningful for everybody,” especially junior employees: “That might be the difference between them being able to get an apartment in the city or having to take the train because they live with their parents in the suburbs.”

Cameo currently has 50 employees, including 26 in Chicago and others around the U.S. and internationally, though most remote workers are concentrated in New York and Los Angeles. The new benefit doesn’t apply to workers outside of Chicago, though “if they wanted to move to Chicagoland, we would give them a [relocation benefit] and they’d be eligible,” Galanis says.

Cameo’s Chicago headquarters opened during the summer of 2024, but leaders never set a schedule of when they expected employees to be in. Without it, workers generally reported to the office two to three times in the middle of the week, Galanis says.

The new four-day policy was announced to staff a month ago. Galanis is reluctant to call it a mandate but says “there wasn’t an ability to opt out.”

“If you live in Chicagoland, you are four days a week in-office — there wasn’t an option on that. And in exchange, we give you a $10,000 raise.”

“If you wanted to move, you could do that” and not be subject to the in-office expectation, Galanis says.

Galanis says none of Cameo’s employees quit the company or moved away from Chicago following the policy announcement. A few outside of Chicago have indicated possibly moving closer to headquarters given the new perks.

Remote workers can also take part in Cameo’s Team Week, launched this summer, where they can be flown to Chicago once a month for a defined week when “everybody’s in,” Galanis says. Since the company covers flights, accommodations and some meals, he says, “if you take advantage of that every month, it’s effectively the same thing as the raise that the Chicagoland folks got.”

Galanis says he’d be in the office five days a week if he could, but recognizes workers have come to appreciate the “flexibility that our employees have earned.”

“We’re hoping Friday can be a flex day,” he says, where workers can take care of doctor’s appointments and other personal needs.

Leaders won’t be tracking attendance. “We’re adults here,” Galanis says, noting that workers who need to step out for personal matters like appointments should just let their manager know ahead of time.

Galanis is hopeful the move will re-energize creativity and speed at the company, and that staff see he’s accessible as a CEO. “Now they see me every day,” he says. “We’re walking around, we’re having lunch together. Some intern can come in and say, ‘Steven, why haven’t we ever done this before?’”

Ultimately, “what we’re really trying to do is maximize the amount of in-person time that our team is getting with each other, and to make sure that we’re able to move at the speed of pop culture,” Galanis says.

Toy and gaming giant Hasbro took an optimistic tone Thursday on the potential effect of Chinese tariffs on its business, as executives said the company is shifting manufacturing away from China.

Hasbro Chief Financial Officer Gina Goetter said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that the toymaker’s 2025 guidance — which includes adjusted EBITDA of $1.1 billion to $1.15 billion, compared with $1.06 billion in 2024 — reflects the anticipated effect of U.S. tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada. It also reflects “mitigating actions we plan to take, including leveraging the strength of our supply chain and potential pricing,” the company said in a news release.

Rival toymaker Mattel previously said it could increase the prices of toys such as Hot Wheels and Barbie in response to tariffs. President Donald Trump imposed 10% tariffs on China in early February and is set to add 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada in March after pausing their initial implementation for 30 days.

Hasbro is on track to cut the volume of U.S. toys and games that originate from China from 50% to less than 40% over the next two years, Goetter said. Hasbro does not source from Canada and has “minimal” imports from Mexico, she said.

“Really, it’s a China story for us,” Goetter said.

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said on the call that even when accounting for tariffs, the toymaker expects “flattish” performance from the broader industry this year, with trading cards and building blocks leading the way. The company’s licensing business, he added, is one of its biggest margin drivers and will not be affected much by tariffs.

“It’s relatively [unexposed] to some of the tariff drama that’s going on right now,” Cocks said.

Hasbro also on Thursday announced a licensing collaboration with Mattel to create Play-Doh versions of Mattel’s Barbie dolls.

“Play-Doh Barbie allows children to unlock their inner fashion designer, creating Play-Doh fashions with amazing ruffles, bows and realistic fabric textures, all made with every kid’s favorite dough for a never-before-seen creativity experience,” Cocks said.

Shares of Hasbro gained roughly 10% in morning trading Thursday.

Here’s how Hasbro performed in the fourth quarter compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Earnings per share: 46 cents adjusted vs. 34 cents expected

Revenue: $1.1 billion vs. $1.03 billion expected

Fourth-quarter revenue fell 15% from $1.29 billion during the same quarter in 2023. Full-year 2024 revenue came in at $4.14 billion, down 17% from $5 billion in 2023.

The company partially attributed the numbers to its divestiture from its eOne film and TV business, which it sold to Lionsgate in December 2023. When excluding the divestiture, the company said, full-year revenue declined 7%.

Hasbro’s digital and licensed gaming revenue increased 35% to $132 million in the fourth quarter compared to the same period in 2023. For full-year 2024, Hasbro’s digital and licensed gaming revenue increased 22% to $471.7 million. Mobile game Monopoly Go! contributed $112 million in 2024 revenue.

Hasbro reported a net loss for the fourth quarter of $26.5 million, or a loss of 25 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $1.06 billion, or a loss of $7.64 per share, during the fourth quarter of 2023.

Adjusting for costs associated with restructuring and the eOne divestiture, among other one-time items, Hasbro reported fourth-quarter earnings of 46 cents per share, topping Wall Street expectations.

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.