Paramount Global told its employees this week that it’s ending numerous diversity, equity and inclusion policies, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.

In the memo sent to employees Wednesday, Paramount said it would comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order banning the practice in the federal government and demanding that agencies investigate private companies over their DEI programs.

Co-CEOs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins cited the executive order in the memo, as well as the Supreme Court and federal mandates, as the impetus for the media giant’s policy changes.

Among the changes, the company said it “will no longer set or use aspirational numerical goals related to the race, ethnicity, sex or gender of hires.” Paramount also said it ended its policy of collecting such stats for its U.S. job applicants on forms and career pages, except in the markets where it’s legally required to do so.

“To be the best storytellers and to continue to drive success, we must have a highly talented, dedicated and creative workforce that reflects the perspectives and experiences of our many different audiences. Values like inclusivity and collaboration are a part of the Paramount culture and will continue to be,” the co-CEOs wrote in the memo.

They added that they will continue to evaluate their policies and seek talent from all backgrounds.

Paramount has taken part in a number of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. It donated millions to racial justice causes in 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd and has touted initiatives such as a supplier diversity program and Content for Change, a campaign to overhaul storytelling about racial equity and mental health. The company has hosted an annual Inclusion Week for years and maintains an Office of Global Inclusion.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion is fundamental to our business,” former CEO Bob Bakish said at Paramount’s 2023 Inclusion Week, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Paramount joins companies like Walmart, Target and Amazon in rolling back their DEI goals and policies in recent months. Others, like Apple and Costco, have publicly defended and committed to their DEI stances, even as the Trump administration has escalated its attacks on the practices.

Media companies have taken a variety of steps to respond to the Trump administration’s policy changes since the president’s inauguration last month.

Earlier this month, Disney changed its DEI programs, which included updating performance factors and rebranding initiatives and employee resource groups, among other things.

Around the same time, public broadcaster PBS — which, as a recipient of federal funding, is more directly affected by Trump’s order than corporations are — said it would shut down its DEI office. CNBC reported that DEI employees would exit the company in order for it to stay in compliance with Trump’s executive order.

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission began investigating Comcast over its DEI efforts. Trump’s executive order, signed on his first day in office, directs federal agencies to identify and probe “most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners” in their sectors. Comcast previously said in a statement it would cooperate with the investigation.

Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

Electric vehicle maker Lucid Group on Tuesday said CEO Peter Rawlinson is stepping down as the company expects to more than double vehicle production this year to 20,000 units.

Lucid said Marc Winterhoff, currently the company’s chief operating officer, will step in as interim CEO. Rawlinson will serve as a “strategic technical advisor to the chairman of the board, stepping aside from his prior roles,” the company said.

“I am incredibly proud of the accomplishments the Lucid team have achieved together through my tenure of these past twelve years,” Rawlinson said in a statement. 

Rawlinson’s departure is unexpected. As one of the company’s largest shareholders, Rawlinson, who also served as chief technology officer, has routinely touted his passion and stake in the automaker.

Lucid’s board has initiated a search to identify a new CEO, the company said.

The CEO change and production target were announced in conjunction with the automaker’s fourth-quarter financial results. For the period ended Dec. 31, the company reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $636.9 million, or a loss of 22 cents per share, on revenue of $234.5 million.

Analysts surveyed by LSEG expected a loss of 25 cents per share on revenue of $214 million.

During the same period last year, Lucid reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $653.8 million, or a loss of 29 cents per share, on revenue of $157.2 million.

The production target for 2025 announced Tuesday is compared with production of 9,029 vehicles and deliveries of 10,241 reported for 2024.

Shares of Lucid were about 10% higher during afterhours trading Tuesday.

As of market close, shares of the company were down about 13% this year amid slower-than-expected adoption of all-electric vehicles and uncertainty about federal support for EVs under the Trump administration. The stock declined by roughly 28% last year.

Elon Musk’s status as the world’s wealthiest person is in no danger of changing.

But since mid-December, the tech titan’s net worth has declined by more than $100 billion, or approximately 25%, as a sell-off in shares of Tesla, his electric car maker, has accelerated in recent weeks.

On Tuesday, the stock closed down another 8% to $302.80 and is off 25% year to date. The latest drawdown comes as new data showed new Tesla vehicle registrations plummeting in Europe, down 45% year-on-year for January, even as overall sales growth of electric-battery vehicles on the continent climbed. Sales in China also recently came in trending down.

Some reports have suggested European buyers are revolting against Musk’s active role in the Trump administration, which is effectively resetting longstanding European relations.

Investors may also simply be locking in the extraordinary gains of the past year or so: Even with the recent drop-off, the stock is still up 52% over the past 12 months.

On Tuesday, Gary Black, managing partner at The Future Fund investment group, said Tesla shares could fall even further this year given an apparent revision in recent Tesla corporate management guidance about deliveries in 2025.

Musk has assumed an unprecedented — and highly controversial — role in American society with his alliance with President Donald Trump and his ostensible leadership of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. Musk also leads SpaceX; the social media platform X; the xAI artificial intelligence company; and Neuralink, a company that is exploring brain-chip implants.

Yet Tesla investors have grown accustomed to Musk’s multiple responsibilities — and indeed, continue to value Tesla stock highly because they see Musk as a uniquely capable figure.

To that point, some investors say Tesla’s recent stock reversal may not endure in the long term. The company is expected to deploy a robo-taxi service later this year, and continues to roll out new models to adapt to shifting driver preferences. It is also unveiling its full-self-driving technology in China.

“Tesla’s superior products, new more affordable vehicle, which I believe will be a new form factor and expand Tesla’s total addressable market, and the promise of unsupervised autonomy will sell more Teslas,” Black wrote on X over the weekend.

Nvidia is scheduled to report fourth-quarter financial results on Wednesday after the bell.

It’s expected to put the finishing touches on one of the most remarkable years from a large company ever. Analysts polled by FactSet expect $38 billion in sales for the quarter ended in January, which would be a 72% increase on an annual basis.

The January quarter will cap off the second fiscal year where Nvidia’s sales more than doubled. It’s a breathtaking streak driven by the fact that Nvidia’s data center graphics processing units, or GPUs, are essential hardware for building and deploying artificial intelligence services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the past two years, Nvidia stock has risen 478%, making it the most valuable U.S. company at times with a market cap over $3 trillion.

But Nvidia’s stock has slowed in recent months as investors question where the chip company can go from here. 

It’s trading at the same price as it did last October, and investors are wary of any signs that Nvidia’s most important customers might be tightening their belts after years of big capital expenditures. This is particularly concerning in the wake of recent breakthroughs in AI out of China. 

Much of Nvidia’s sales go to a handful of companies building massive server farms, usually to rent out to other companies. These cloud companies are typically called “hyperscalers.” Last February, Nvidia said a single customer accounted for 19% of its total revenue in fiscal 2024.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimated this month that Microsoft will account for nearly 35% of spending in 2025 on Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest AI chip. Google is at 32.2%, Oracle at 7.4% and Amazon at 6.2%.

This is why any sign that Microsoft or its rivals might pull back spending plans can shake Nvidia stock.

Last week, TD Cowen analysts said that they’d learned that Microsoft had canceled leases with private data center operators, slowed its process of negotiating to enter into new leases and adjusted plans to spend on international data centers in favor of U.S. facilities.

The report raised fears about the sustainability of AI infrastructure growth. That could mean less demand for Nvidia’s chips. TD Cowen’s Michael Elias said his team’s finding points to “a potential oversupply position” for Microsoft. Shares of Nvidia fell 4% on Friday.

Microsoft pushed back Monday, saying it still planned to spend $80 billion on infrastructure in 2025.

“While we may strategically pace or adjust our infrastructure in some areas, we will continue to grow strongly in all regions. This allows us to invest and allocate resources to growth areas for our future,” a spokesperson told CNBC.

Over the last month, most of Nvidia’s key customers touted large investments. Alphabet is targeting $75 billion in capital expenditures this year, Meta will spend as much as $65 billion and Amazon is aiming to spend $100 billion.

Analysts say about half of AI infrastructure capital expenditures ends up with Nvidia. Many hyperscalers dabble in AMD’s GPUs and are developing their own AI chips to lessen their dependence on Nvidia, but the company holds the majority of the market for cutting-edge AI chips.

So far, these chips have been used primarily to train new age AI models, a process that can cost hundreds of millions dollars. After the AI is developed by companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, warehouses full of Nvidia GPUs are required to serve those models to customers. That’s why Nvidia projects its revenue to continue growing.

Another challenge for Nvidia is last month’s emergence of Chinese startup DeepSeek, which released an efficient and “distilled” AI model. It had high enough performance that suggested billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs aren’t needed to train and use cutting-edge AI. That temporarily sunk Nvidia’s stock, causing the company to lose almost $600 billion in market cap. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will have an opportunity on Wednesday to explain why AI will continue to need even more GPU capacity even after last year’s massive build-out.

Recently, Huang has spoken about the “scaling law,” an observation from OpenAI in 2020 that AI models get better the more data and compute are used when creating them.

Huang said that DeepSeek’s R1 model points to a new wrinkle in the scaling law that Nvidia calls “Test Time Scaling.” Huang has contended that the next major path to AI improvement is by applying more GPUs to the process of deploying AI, or inference. That allows chatbots to “reason,” or generate a lot of data in the process of thinking through a problem.

AI models are trained only a few times to create and fine-tune them. But AI models can be called millions of times per month, so using more compute at inference will require more Nvidia chips deployed to customers.

“The market responded to R1 as in, ‘oh my gosh, AI is finished,’ that AI doesn’t need to do any more computing anymore,” Huang said in a pretaped interview last week. “It’s exactly the opposite.”

McDonald’s is leaning into its reputation as a breakfast value offering, vowing to reject a surcharge on meals with eggs while announcing a special one-day discount on Egg McMuffins.

The fast-food giant said in a release that to mark the 50th anniversary of its breakfast-menu cornerstone, customers on Sunday would be able to purchase an Egg McMuffin sandwich, as well as a Sausage McMuffin With Egg sandwich, through the McDonald’s app for just $1.

“At McDonald’s, breakfast isn’t just a meal; it’s a cherished tradition and cornerstone of our brand,” McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger said Tuesday. “Every morning when we open our doors, we are a breakfast restaurant.”

Coinciding with the release, a McDonald’s executive emphasized in a LinkedIn post that the chain had no intention to charge customers extra for meals featuring eggs amid a nationwide shortage that has sent prices soaring and prompted at least two other national chains to do so.

‘Unlike others making news recently, you definitely WON’T see McDonald’s USA issuing surcharges on eggs, which are 100% cage-free and sourced in the U.S.,’ wrote Michael Gonda, McDonald’s chief impact officer for North America.

The announcements come as McDonald’s tries to leave a recent slump behind: Earlier this month, it reported its worst quarterly sales drop since the pandemic — but forecast improving results for 2025.

Year to date, its shares are up some 6%, outperforming broader market indexes.

Home Depot on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s quarterly sales expectations, even as elevated interest rates and housing prices dampened consumer demand for large remodels and pricier projects.

For the full year ahead, the company said it expects total sales to grow by 2.8% and comparable sales, which take out the impact of one-time factors like store openings and calendar differences, to increase by about 1%. Home Depot projected adjusted earnings per share will decline about 2% compared with the prior year.

In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail said “housing is still frozen by mortgage rates.” Yet he said Home Depot saw broad-based growth, as sales increased in about half of its merchandise categories and 15 of its 19 U.S. geographic regions.

Home Depot anticipates consumers will stop putting off projects as they gradually get used to higher interest rates, rather than waiting for them to fall, McPhail said. 

“They tell us their lives are moving on,” he said. “Their families are growing. They’re moving for a new job. They’re upsizing their home. They want to upgrade their standard of living. Home improvement always persists, and so the question, I think, will be around the mindset of whether long-term rates have gotten to a new normal.”

Here’s what the company reported for the fiscal fourth quarter compared with Wall Street’s estimates, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Home Depot shares were up nearly 5% in midday trading. The company was holding an earnings call on Tuesday morning.

In the three-month period that ended Feb. 2, Home Depot’s net income climbed to $3.0 billion, or $3.02 per share, from $2.80 billion, or $2.82 per share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 14% from $34.79 billion in the year-ago period.

Comparable sales, a metric also known as same-store sales, increased 0.8% across the company. Those results ended eight consecutive quarters of falling comparable sales. They also exceeded analysts’ expectations of a decline of 1.7%, according to StreetAccount. Comparable sales in the U.S. increased 1.3% year over year.

Regions hit by hurricanes Helene and Milton contributed about 0.6% to comparable sales, McPhail said.

Customers spent more and visited Home Depot’s stores and website more in the quarter compared with the year-ago period. Transactions rose to 400.4 million, up nearly 8% from the year-ago period. The average ticket was $89.11 in the quarter, up slightly from $88.87 in the prior-year quarter.

Home Depot has faced a more difficult backdrop for selling supplies for home improvement projects. Sales growth slowed in 2023, after consumers’ huge appetite for home renovations during the Covid pandemic returned to more typical patterns. Inflation and a shift back to spending on services like vacations and restaurants also dinged consumer demand for larger projects and pricier items.

Since roughly the middle of 2023, Home Depot’s leaders have pinned the company’s problems on a tougher housing market. McPhail told CNBC that the same challenge persisted in the fourth quarter, as consumers still showed reluctance to splurge on bigger projects, such as redoing a kitchen or installing new flooring.

Mortgage rates have remained high, despite interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. The median price of a home sold in January was $396,900, up 4.8% from the year before and the highest price ever for the month of January, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Tougher weather also hurt the company’s sales in January, and that’s carried into February in some parts of the country, McPhail said.

“Where weather is good, we continue to see engagement,” he said. “Where weather is tough, projects get put on the shelf.”

Even so, he said Home Depot has focused on ways it can move the needle, such as opening new stores and investing in its e-commerce business. 

Online sales rose 9% in the fourth quarter compared with the year-ago period, McPhail said, the strongest quarter of the year for Home Depot’s digital business. He chalked that up to the company’s investments in faster deliveries, particularly with getting appliances and power tools to customers.

McPhail said Home Depot opened 12 new stores in 2024, and it plans to open 13 new locations in the coming year. 

Home Depot has also looked to home professionals as one of its major sales drivers. It bought SRS Distribution, a Texas-based company that sells supplies to professionals in the roofing, pool and landscaping businesses, for $18.25 billion last year. It marked the largest acquisition in the company’s history.

Some pro-heavy categories, such as roofing, drywall and lumber, saw sales increases in the quarter because of Home Depot’s push to serve contractors and other home pros better, McPhail said.

Shares of Home Depot closed Monday at $382.42. As of Monday’s close, the company’s shares have fallen about 2% so far this year. That trails behind the S&P 500′s approximately 2% gains during the same period.

Direct-to-consumer footwear brand Rothy’s just recorded its best year on record after the company appointed retail veteran Jenny Ming, one of the co-founders of Old Navy, as its CEO. 

Ming took the helm of the flats maker from co-founder Stephen Hawthornthwaite in January 2024. Under her direction, the company grew sales 17% to $211 million last year, its best volume year since it launched nearly a decade ago. 

Comparable sales at its stores grew 20% and it posted positive EBITDA for the full year, with margins above 10%. 

Rothy’s outperformed the U.S. footwear market, which was flat in 2024 compared with 2023, according to Circana. 

Rothy’s growth, which came from an expansion into wholesale and a focus on brick-and-mortar stores, comes as direct-to-consumer darlings find it harder than ever to survive with the pure-play models that once wowed investors at the turn of the decade. 

Once considered the future of the industry, these online-only businesses are now leaning into the retail fundamentals that have long been the building blocks of emerging brands. Wholesale partnerships are a critical customer acquisition tool, and stores still matter.

As these plucky startups contend with the challenges that come with an online-only business, the winners are adapting to a new reality where stores, wholesale partnerships and e-commerce all need to be part of the mix to ensure they can operate profitably. 

“A lot of people are like, why would you be on Amazon? Because people do a lot of searches on Amazon. If we weren’t there, and they type in Rothy’s, a competitor or somebody else would show up. So why wouldn’t we want to be there?” Ming told CNBC in an interview. “To me, it’s really thinking a little bit more holistically and broadly. What our customer would want from us is how we approach it … people shop very different today.” 

Channel diversification will never be a panacea for a business that’s inherently broken or doesn’t serve a market need. The footwear industry and specialty retail overall is more competitive than ever, and Rothy’s needs to continue its efforts to diversify, scale and expand into new categories to keep up its performance.

Soon after Rothy’s launched in 2016, it quickly made a name for itself with its ubiquitous Instagram and Facebook advertisements and an innovative approach on sustainable shoe manufacturing that included using recycled plastic to make machine washable products. By 2019, it was Meghan Markle’s flat of choice and it had developed a cult following. 

Buoyed by a record year for valuations and 0% interest rates, Brazilian footwear company Alpargatas took a 49.9% stake in Rothy’s in 2021 that resulted in a post-investment valuation of $1 billion. 

Rothy’s used the investment to build out a store fleet, but by that time, the company’s growth had stagnated and it was struggling to reach profitability. 

“Once we sort of emerged from the pandemic, you could see a lot of these digitally native brands now sort of saying, OK, now what, right? I need stores. It is so expensive to acquire customers online,” said Dayna Quanbeck, Rothy’s president. ”[With] an e-commerce model … all of your costs are variable, right? Where you really find scale and you really find profitability is where you can leverage your fixed costs, which is stores, really, and wholesale.”

Ming, who served as Old Navy’s president between 1996 and 2006 and later became the CEO of Charlotte Russe, joined Rothy’s board in 2022 and was later asked to take over as CEO. She said no at first, but later agreed to take the helm after she spent a few months consulting and saw the early innings of a transformation beginning to take shape. She immediately started focusing on improving profitability and generating sales momentum by making sure Rothy’s was selling the types of products that its customers wanted — and in the places they shopped. 

“I literally went line by line … looking at what we should spend, what we shouldn’t, you know, and rightsize marketing spend. There was things that, you know, we don’t need,” said Ming, citing office plants as one of the first things she cut. “But the main thing is, driving profitability is really in revenue. You have to be growing your sales in order to really be profitable, right?” 

That’s where Rothy’s new selling strategy came in. In 2024, it began testing with a select number of wholesale partners — Anthopologie, Bloomingdale’s, Amazon and toward the end of the year, Nordstrom.

At the same time, it continued growing its store fleet. Now, a business that drew about 99% of its revenue from its website does about 70% of sales online, with the rest balanced between stores and wholesalers. Combining profitable stores with strong wholesale partnerships, Rothy’s has been able to grow sales and become more profitable at the same time.

“If we were just digitally native forever and ever, you really just can’t get there with the cost of acquisition, with the cost of, you know, just showing up these days,” said Quanbeck. “Honestly, it’s impossible.” 

Looking ahead, Rothy’s is planning to build on its wholesale partnerships and has made stores, along with international expansion, a central part of its strategy. 

Quanbeck said it’s hard to sell customers on everything that makes the brand appealing without them being able to see it in person.

“But when you can walk into the store and you can see it visually, you have a great customer experience where we can really tell the story,” said Quanbeck “It’s additive. And we know that the lifetime value of those customers that engage with us IRL is really high.” 

Quanbeck and Ming, who are alumni of now-bankrupt Charlotte Russe, know all too well the perils of overexpanding unprofitable store fleets, and said they’re taking a balanced approach to brick-and-mortar. The 26 stores Rothy’s has are small and all are profitable and the company plans to open another eight to 10 doors this year, said Quanbeck.

Ming said Rothy’s won’t need hundreds of stores, but she’d like to see the fleet grow to 75, or perhaps even 100. 

“But we also want to make sure our wholesale partners is in the picture,” said Ming. “We’re going to be in [Nordstrom] in March … they have more stores than we will ever have, so they might be in markets that we might not decide to open a store but then we still have a partner for our customer to shop in.” 

When asked if Rothy’s will pursue an initial public offering or look to be acquired, Ming said the business isn’t there yet — and her team doesn’t need the distraction.

“We had a really great year but … I keep telling the team, one year doesn’t make it a trend,” said Ming. “So we’re really focused on this year. I think if we have another great year, you know, maybe a year or two, I think then we could really step back and say, ‘What next?’”

Denny’s is the latest nationwide restaurant chain to announce surcharges for meals that include eggs in response to a nationwide shortage that has sent U.S. prices skyward.

In a statement, the breakfast giant said that individual markets and restaurants would be responsible for deciding the surcharge price. It declined to quote any pricing examples, describing it as a ‘fluid situation.’

‘Denny’s remains committed to providing our guests with delicious meals they love at the value they expect,’ it said. ‘We do our best to plan ahead with our vendors on items like eggs to minimize the impact market volatility has on our costs and menu pricing.’

Denny’s follows Waffle House among major food purveyors announcing egg surcharges. Many local media reports have also found individual restaurants adding surcharges in recent weeks.

USDA data show a dozen eggs now cost more than $7 on average and have jumped another 10% in just the past week to a fresh all-time high as avian flu continues to spread on many of the nation’s poultry farms.

Fabrics outlet Joann will shutter all of its approximately 800 locations after failing to find a buyer who would keep its stores open.

In a statement, the company said it would commence nationwide going-out-of-business sales as a stipulation of the group that won its assets at auction.

‘JOANN leadership, our Board, advisors and legal partners made every possible effort to pursue a more favorable outcome that would keep the company in business,’ the company said. ‘We are committed to working constructively with the winning bidder to ensure an orderly wind-down of operations that minimizes the impact on all our stakeholders. We deeply appreciate our dedicated Team Members, our customers and communities across the nation for their unwavering support for more than 80 years.”

Joann was founded as the Cleveland Fabric Shop by German immigrants during World War II. At one point, it was the largest fabrics retailer in the U.S.

The company went public in 2010, but was de-listed within a year. It experienced a brief revival thanks to the stay-at-home crafts boom during the pandemic. Joann went public again in 2021, but by 2023 its sales had tanked, and it filed for an initial bankruptcy proceeding in 2024.

Joann listed some 19,000 employees, most of them part-time, when it filed for its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing in January.

The company posted an extensive FAQ on its website with details about the going-out-of-business sales, which are set to commence immediately.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Monday said the U.S. government is inefficient and in need of work as the Trump administration terminates thousands of federal employees and works to dismantle agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Dimon was asked by CNBC’s Leslie Picker whether he supported efforts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. He declined to give what he called a “binary” response, but made comments that supported the overall effort.

“The government is inefficient, not very competent, and needs a lot of work,” Dimon told Picker. “It’s not just waste and fraud, its outcomes.”

The Trump administration’s effort to rein in spending and scrutinize federal agencies “needs to be done,” Dimon added.

“Why are we spending the money on these things? Are we getting what we deserve? What should we change?” Dimon said. “It’s not just about the deficit, its about building the right policies and procedures and the government we deserve.”

Dimon said if DOGE overreaches with its cost-cutting efforts or engages in activity that’s not legal, “the courts will stop it.”

“I’m hoping it’s quite successful,” he said.

In the wide-ranging interview, Dimon also addressed his company’s push to have most workers in office five days a week, as well as his views on the Ukraine conflict, tariffs and the U.S. consumer.