Raphael Stevens

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said he would step down by the end of the year amid Boeing’s 737 Max safety crisis.
Boeing said Calhoun’s total compensation for 2023 was $32.8 million, up from $22.6 billion.
The company said it will tie more executive compensation to safety goals going forward.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., before meeting with a group of senators on Jan. 24, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images

Outgoing Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun’s take-home pay fell to $5 million last year after declining a bonus, compared with $7 million in 2022, and his latest compensation package is taking a hit from the prolonged safety crisis surrounding the company’s bestselling jetliner, the 737 Max.
Calhoun’s total compensation last year rose 45% to $32.8 million, up from $22.6 million in the prior year. But Boeing said the 2023 sum is closer to $23.5 million, as it includes long-term incentives such as stock. Shares of the plane-maker are down almost 30% this year.

Total compensation for Stan Deal, whom Boeing last month replaced at the top of the commercial airplanes division, rose 42% to $12.5 million.
Calhoun last month said he would step down by the end of the year. His departure is part of a broad shake-up in which the company also replaced its chairman and head of its commercial airplane unit. The manufacturer is grappling with the fallout of a door plug panel that blew out midair from a 737 Max operated by Alaska Airlines in January.
Boeing disclosed the take-home pay, which did not include a 2023 bonus Calhoun declined that was valued at $2.8 million, and executive compensation in a filing Friday. The company said it will now more closely tie executive compensation to safety goals.
“I promise that I personally, and we as a Board, will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to get this company where it needs to be,” newly named Boeing Chairman Steve Mollenkopf said in a message to shareholders in a filing Friday.
The Jan. 5 accident has slowed deliveries of new jets and Boeing has said it will burn more cash than it previously expected. The company is scheduled to release first-quarter results April 24.

Calhoun took the helm at Boeing in January 2020 after his predecessor was ousted for his handling of the aftermath of two fatal crashes of the 737 Max. In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic’s devastating effect on the aviation industry, Boeing has also had a host of quality defects on its aircraft. Those have slowed deliveries of new planes to customers clamoring for fresh jets as travel snapped back, hurting Boeing’s cash flow.
The Alaska Airlines door plug near-catastrophe was the most serious issue since the crashes. The Justice Department is investigating the Alaska Airlines accident and the Federal Aviation Administration has capped Boeing’s 737 Max production until it signs off on Boeing’s quality control.
Boeing said on Friday that “operational performance metrics for all business units will be focused exclusively on quality and safety goals” this year and that long-term executive incentives could be reduced to zero if goals are not met.
Boeing last posted an annual profit in 2018.
Clarification: CEO Dave Calhoun’s total 2023 compensation is closer to $23.5 million. An earlier version contained a figure that was later updated by Boeing.

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The Walt Disney Company has updated its theatrical slate.
Disney revealed that one of its 2026 Star Wars films would be “The Mandalorian & Grogu,” featuring the iconic duo from its Disney+ series “The Mandalorian,” slated for theatrical release on May 22, 2026.
A fifth “Toy Story” film is set to hit theaters on June 19, 2026, and “Tron: Ares” is scheduled for Oct. 10, 2025.

The Mandalorian and the Child (Grogu) on Disney+’s “The Mandalorian.”

The Walt Disney Company on Friday revealed its new theatrical schedule, which will feature a film about the Mandalorian and Grogu, a fifth “Toy Story” film, and another “Tron” flick before the end of 2026.
The company’s theatrical business has struggled in the wake of pandemic shutdowns and dual Hollywood labor strikes, as productions stalled and moviegoers’ box-office habits shifted. All the while, Disney struggled to connect with audiences, which further exacerbated revenue woes.

Since returning to the helm at Disney in late 2022, CEO Bob Iger has been working to right the ship. He’s admitted that the quality of its films suffered in its bid to pump out a high quantity of entertainment content.He said brands such as Marvel, in particular, needed to be more selective about which sequels get made.
Iger also said he would no longer tolerate his company’s partners and creative team prioritizing messaging over storytelling.
Disney’s updated slate features several iconic franchises, as well as some releases for adult audiences.
Notably, the company’s “Moana” sequel has been pushed to July 2026. It was originally slated to open in 2025.
“The Amateur,” a 20th Century Production starring Oscar winner Rami Malek, moved to April 2025 from its previous November 2024 date. And “Nightbitch,” a Searchlight feature with Amy Adams attached, will release in December 2024.

Disney teased that one of its 2026 Star Wars films would feature the iconic duo from its Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” and revealed its title will be “The Mandalorian & Grogu.” It is slated for theatrical release on May 22, 2026.
A fifth “Toy Story” film is set to hit theaters on June 19, 2026, and “Tron: Ares” is slated for Oct. 10, 2025. More

Skydance Media, RedBird Capital and KKR want to take a significant minority or slight majority stake in a publicly traded Paramount Global, sources told CNBC.
The consortium has entered exclusive talks with Paramount Global to try to reach a deal.
Skydance CEO David Ellison and RedBird’s Jeff Shell, the former CEO of NBCUniversal, would both have leadership roles in a new company if a deal is approved, sources told CNBC.

Skydance Media’s offer to acquire National Amusements and merge its studio with Paramount Pictures isn’t a conventional takeover. The question for Paramount Global shareholders might be: Is it better than no deal at all?
Skydance has made a unique pitch to Paramount Global’s special committee, in charge of accepting or rejecting transactions, and its investors, according to four people familiar with the parameters of the offer. Paramount Global would continue to trade publicly. Skydance would own either a substantial minority stake or a majority stake in Paramount Global by merging its assets and raising new equity, which it would acquire along with its private equity partners RedBird Capital Partners and KKR.

The consortium’s ownership percentage in the new company could be around 45% or just over 50%, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. No details have been nailed down and are all still subject to change, the people said.
Spokespeople for Paramount Global and Skydance declined to comment.
The new equity will be dilutive for existing shareholders. But it will align voting and economic control in a way that hasn’t been the case with the Redstone family, which currently directly or indirectly owns 77% of the Class A voting stock of Paramount Global and 5.2% of the Class B common stock, about 10% of the overall equity of the company.
While Skydance CEO David Ellison is primarily in charge of orchestrating the deal, his father, Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison, would be putting up some of the new funding, said the people. He would also potentially provide Paramount Global with access to artificial intelligence software and other data technology from Oracle.
Paramount Global has many valuable legacy media assets, including CBS, the Paramount Pictures studio and its physical lot, a studio library with films such as “The Godfather,” “Titanic,” and “Forrest Gump” and cable networks such as Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. It also owns its subscription streaming service Paramount+, with more than 67.5 million subscribers, and its free advertising supported service Pluto TV, with more than 80 million monthly active users.

Still, it’s struggled to grow in recent years. Paramount Global’s annual revenue for 2023 was $29.7 billion, a 1.7% decline from 2022. Paramount+ continues to lose money. Paramount Global’s debt rating was cut to junk by S&P Global Ratings last month because the company’s broadcast and cable TV business is declining as traditional pay TV subscribers cancel.
Paramount Global has a market capitalization of about $7.6 billion and had $14.6 billion in long-term debt at the end of 2023. When CBS and Viacom merged in 2019, the combined market value of the company was about $30 billion.
Shares were trading about 5% lower Friday.

The Skydance plan

In the past decade, Oracle successfully transformed from a legacy enterprise technology company to a cloud services and AI-focused business. That provides a similar thematic blueprint for what the Ellisons would like to do with Paramount Global – a legacy media company that needs to lean into the future to justify its existence.
David Ellison would likely lead the new company.
Former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell, in his capacity as chairman for sports and media at RedBird, is also expected to have a major leadership role. Management would be open to divestitures that current CEO Bob Bakish has examined but ultimately rejected, such as selling BET Media Group and Showtime, the people said.
New leadership would also assess more existential questions to Paramount Global, such as the future of Paramount+ and what the company’s role should be in a broader media ecosystem. No decisions have been made yet about these larger strategies, the people said.

Better than nothing

The transaction as proposed isn’t a full takeover of Paramount Global. That’s what Paramount Global’s board would prefer, but Ellison has balked, the people said.
Still, the message to investors will be that the combination of David Ellison, his dad’s involvement, Shell, Skydance’s assets and its commitment to new media (including Skydance’s video game development studio) is simply better for future growth than Redstone and Bakish.
The Paramount Global special committee will need to decide if Skydance’s complicated transaction is better than the status quo — and also better than any other offer that may still come. The two sides have entered exclusive talks to do deeper due diligence and potentially reach a deal in the coming month or two, the people said.
There still could be other avenues to pursue. Private equity firm Apollo Global Management lobbed in a recent bid of $26 billion for the entire company, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. But the Paramount Global special committee has chosen to move forward with the Skydance talks in exclusivity. Redstone has unofficially sought a buyer for Paramount Global for years, according to people familiar with the matter. The late offer by Apollo may be an attempt to keep the private equity firm around the hoop in case the Skydance transaction falls through.
Warner Bros. Discovery held preliminary discussions with Paramount Global but stopped working on a deal earlier this year, CNBC reported in February.
WATCH: Faber report: Paramount Global deal moves to fast lane

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC. More

Spire Global — which offers information on weather, climate, and ship and aircraft movements, as well as has a space services business — is hoping weather forecasting can become even more more accurate.
CEO Peter Platzer said the radio frequency sensing company sees a huge potential for such improvements.
He also said a new partnership with Nvidia will inspire “more valuable products and new use cases.”

Spire Global at the New York Stock Exchange, August 17, 2021.
Source: NYSE

Artificial intelligence has been instrumental to weather forecast modeling for years, and recent breakthroughs in generative AI dangle the possibility of it becoming more accurate.
That’s what Spire Global is betting on in its recently announced partnership with AI darling Nvidia.

“What deep learning and neural networks and generative AI have done is they have shifted the power from those who have access to supercomputers a bit more to those who have access to super data,” Peter Platzer, CEO and co-founder of Spire Global, told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview on CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast. 
“Because the supercomputer side with a model has been replaced with hyper efficient GPUs [graphics processing units], you can run something that used to take eight hours, and you can now run it in eight seconds,” he explained. “For us, that has been always a vision that we knew eventually was going to come, so when this [Nvidia] partnership became possible, we jumped on that.”
Twelve-year old Spire Global is in the radio frequency sensing business, operating a satellite constellation that collects space-based radio frequency data that can be analyzed and sold as a service. It offers information on weather, climate, and ship and aircraft movements, as well as has a space services business.
The opportunity in weather forecasting, though, is huge: A third of the global economy — roughly $30 trillion worth of global GDP — ranging from trade to agriculture to power generation is subject to weather, according to Platzer.
He estimates there are some 175 major use cases across up to 200,000 customers or customer types globally when it comes to weather forecasting. In other words, the need for more accurate forecasts, particularly with more lead time, is in high demand.

Follow and listen to CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast, hosted by Morgan Brennan, wherever you get your podcasts.

So what does this collaboration with Nvidia entail?
“It allows us access to their infrastructure to serve our customers better, with more valuable products and new use cases … and them access to our data to improve their modeling, their machinery,” Platzer said.
Nonetheless, “at this point in time there is no immediate economic flow from Nvidia to Spire or vice versa,” he noted.
As has been the case with a growing list of companies working with the semiconductor stalwart, investors reacted favorably to the news, which was disclosed at Nvidia’s GTC developer conference in March.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a “digital twin” of Earth called Earth-2 onstage that essentially pairs the open cloud platform with Nvidia’s generative AI model CorrDiff and Spire’s satellite data to improve existing weather and climate prediction models.
Spire Global, a small capitalization stock that went public through a SPAC merger in 2021, shot up roughly 40% in response.
Spire then raised $30 million through a direct offering of common stock to two institutional investors — an offering that closed last week.
“We had a number of investors competing to get in on the Spire story,” Platzer said. “For us, it means that we can deliver the balance sheet, we can lower our cost of capital, we can create more flexibility … we’re going to have fewer debt payments, which increases our free cash flow and that helps us on that path to free cash flow profitability.”
Spire Global forecasts achieving positive free cash flow this summer, or by the third quarter of 2024.

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Hyundai’s Genesis launched in the U.S. nearly eight years ago to much skepticism but the South Korean luxury brand has proven itself worthy in the domestic market.
Sales have grown exponentially and executives expect double-digit growth annually for at least the next five years.
For the short term, Genesis is expected to grow awareness and sales with new “Magma” performance models and potentially an upcoming new three-row SUV.

Michael Wayland / CNBC

NEW YORK — When Hyundai Motor launched its Genesis luxury brand domestically in 2016, many were skeptical the South Korean automaker — recognized mainly for budget vehicles at the time — knew what it was doing.
Among the skeptics were auto industry veterans Randy Parker and Claudia Marquez. Both were working for Nissan’s luxury Infiniti brand at the time and they’ve since made the leap over to Hyundai Group, with Parker leading the Hyundai brand in the U.S.

“We both were looking at it like, ‘Oh, my God, how are these guys going to be able to make it?’ I mean, nothing against. It’s just complicated. A new brand in such a competitive set,” Marquez, who now leads Genesis in North America, told CNBC last week at the New York International Auto Show.
Not only has Genesis made it, the brand has thrived to become a dark horse in the U.S. luxury market with unique styling, unexpected comfort and well-ranked quality. It’s done so with both gas-powered and electric vehicles.

Patricia Wayne, first all-electric GV60 customer and Claudia Marquez (right), chief operating officer, Genesis Motor North America, at Genesis Santa Monica, Santa Monica, Calif., May 26, 2022.

The brand has overtaken the decades-old Infiniti brand in annual U.S. sales since 2022. Executives expect to continue annual double-digit growth over the next five years, according to Marquez, who was named Genesis’ North American chief operating officer in October 2021.
“We have to outpace, by far, the luxury market,” she said. “It’s going to continue being strong. It has to be a marathon, not a sprint.”
Genesis started as a vehicle in Hyundai’s lineup but the company announced in late 2015 that it would become its own brand. Since then, its U.S. sales have grown from fewer than 7,000 vehicles in 2016 to more than 69,000 last year.

Growing awareness

Along those lines, Marquez and José Muñoz, Hyundai president and global chief operating officer, noted that while robust Genesis’ growth is expected, it will be at a restricted pace to retain the residual values and pricing of the vehicles.
Muñoz said expectations for the brand are “still high” but its volume ambitions for the U.S. are more in line with its rivals such as Porsche than that of Lexus and Mercedes-Benz, which sell hundreds of thousands of vehicles annually.  

Hyundai CEO Jae Hoon Chang (left) and José Muñoz, Hyundai president and global chief operating officer, attend the 2024 New York International Auto Show
Michael Wayland | CNBC

“We still have a long ways to go, but this is not a mass brand. So, we don’t have a huge volume aspirations, but there’s still a significant way to go,” Muñoz, who also serves as CEO of Hyundai Motor and Genesis Motor North America, said during a separate interview at the show.
The brand’s closest competitors based on 2023 sales were Land Rover (71,727 units), Porsche (75,415 units), Lincoln (81,818) and Volvo (128,350). Genesis sales last year increased about 23% over the prior year to 69,175 vehicles.
One of Genesis’ greatest challenges remains awareness, Marquez said. Stephanie Brinley, principal automotive analyst at S&P Global Mobility, agreed with that perception.
“It’s an upstart that’s gained credibility; now it has to gain a wider audience,” Brinley said. “It is respected at this point. The problem is, just not quite enough people know about it yet. … That’s the space it occupies right now.”

Michael Wayland / CNBC

Performance models

For the short term, Genesis is looking to grow awareness and sales with new “Magma” performance models. It intends to offer a performance variant for each production vehicle, the company said last week in conjunction with the auto show in New York.
The brand also may expand its lineup with a three-row SUV. Genesis revealed a large, all-electric concept SUV last week. Marquez declined to discuss potential production plans but said to expect such a vehicle “sooner rather than later.”
Genesis currently offers three sedans (G70, G80, G90) and three SUVs (GV60, GV70, GV80). The G80, GV60 and GV70 are also available as all-electric vehicles. Genesis’ 2024 starting prices range from about $41,500 for the G70 to more than $89,000 for the G90.

GV60 Magma Concept 

Worldwide, the Genesis G80 is the best-selling model in the brand’s vehicle lineup since its introduction in 2016, with 390,738 units sold across the global market, including electrified G80 models. 
The brand is likely to get a boost in local manufacturing with a new $7.6 billion factory expected to begin production later this year in Georgia.
Muñoz said Genesis will be a “key focus of the plant,” which also will produce Hyundai and Kia vehicles. The brand currently assembles the GV70 gas and electric SUVs at a plant in Alabama, while the other models are imported from South Korea.
“The products are very strong. They’re very welcomed by the consumer as we have focused on [the U.S.],” Muñoz said. “This is the most important market for a Genesis without a doubt.”

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