Financial Mindset

In today’s CEO Daily: How CEOs are protecting their pay packages by lowering their goals The big leadership story: Whether Meta’s reported 20% layoffs will encourage a new wave of job cuts The markets: A big Asia rebound Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from  Fortune . Good morning. Call it the Hall of Blame. One time-honored tradition in business is to take credit for what goes well, blame disappointing results on factors beyond your control and lower the bar in tough times to be able to clear it so that your pay package remains intact. When Apple set performance targets for fiscal 2025 for CEO Tim Cook and his executive team last year, the board set goals at or below the prior year’s result, citing “trade policy” and an “uncertain macroeconomic outlook.” As my colleague Amanda Gerut points out , that essentially guaranteed that Cook would take home a $12 million bonus, no matter how well he did. ( Apple handily surpassed the modest targets.) With wobbly mar...

U.S. President Donald Trump is considering delaying a key meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping “by a month or so” as he struggles to manage the surging conflict with Iran. The meeting was set to take place between March 31 and April 2, building on the two leaders’ previous face-to-face dialogue in South Korea last October .  On Monday, Trump pushed back against claims that he was considering postponing his visit to pressure China to intervene in the Strait of Hormuz, a key strategic waterway currently closed by Iran. “I’m looking forward to being with [Xi],” Trump told reporters at the White House on March 16. “[But] it’s very simple, we’ve got a war going on, and I think it’s important that I be here.” Still, a delay to the meeting will mean that Trump and Xi will have to wait to discuss a number of factors dragging down the U.S.-China relationship, such as China’s continued export controls on critical minerals, the U.S.’s export controls on semiconductors, and U.S. demand...

As the Iran war drags deeper into its third week, one seemingly obvious solution for more energy is crude oil from Venezuela after the Trump administration seized former leader Nicolás Maduro and pressed for the reopening of the nation’s oil sector. The glaring problem is more oil from Venezuela—or any other source around the world—represents only metaphorical drops in the global supply bucket compared to the massive losses each day from the Persian Gulf and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. “It’s a math problem,” said Fernando Ferreira, director of the geopolitical risk service at Rapidan Energy Group. “Hormuz flows about 20 million barrels [of oil] a day. Venezuela is currently producing about 1 million [barrels daily].” The issue is there simply are no alternatives to the de facto closure of the passageway that sees about 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas trek through it each day. “Venezuela helps; every little bit helps. But, in the grand sc...

When Apple CEO Tim Cook and his executive team received their performance targets for fiscal 2025, the board set a modest bar for bonus payouts. The new targets, including sales and operating profit, did not require Apple’s leadership to expand the business—the board set goals at the same level or below the prior year’s results, citing “trade policy” and an “uncertain macroeconomic outlook.” At the end of the fiscal year, Cook and his team delivered lights-out, extraordinary results anyway, not only blowing past the lackluster bar set by the board, but handily surpassing the prior year’s results, with net sales increasing 6% and operating income increasing 8%. Cook collected the maximum bonus payout of $12 million—just as he would have, had the company not performed as well, thanks to the safety net offered by Apple’s board. Apple’s board is hardly unique. An exclusive analysis of pay data from 50 public companies by Compensation Advisory Partners (CAP), published Friday , reveal...

The richest person in the world and the most well-known person leading the cause against creating more people like him have many differing views on taxing the ultrawealthy. But now, Elon Musk and Sen. Bernie Sanders, two men on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, are using the same math to make opposite arguments for how much billionaires should be taxed, and how that money should be allocated. In Musk’s view, collecting every cent billionaires rake in pales in comparison to federal debt, which is now hurling towards $39 trillion and counting. “Even if you tax every billionaire in America at 100%, it barely makes a dent in the national debt,” Musk wrote on X in 2023. “In the end, the government will be forced to tax everyone to pay the debt.” Sanders agrees—but he’s not looking to tax billionaires for all their worth and he’s not trying to eliminate the debt. Instead, he wants enough to give nearly three-quarters of the nation a nice check, offset cuts to federal health pro...

After a grueling 25 hours of debate on the House floor, complete with an almost show-stopping filibuster effort of more than 80 amendments by Republicans to stop the bill from moving forward, Washington made history this week with the passage of a millionaires tax bill, which would create the first income tax in the state’s history. On March 9, lawmakers passed a 9.9% tax on personal income above $1 million per year—a first for the income-taxless state. The final vote was 52–46, and involved the longest floor debate in Washington history, far exceeding the previous record of nine hours. “We knew it was going to be a pretty major endeavor,” Rep. Brianna Thomas, a Democrat who supported the measure, told Fortune . “We’ve got 93 years of precedent in front of us, behind us, around us at all times on the conversation around an income tax.” Washington was one of only nine states with no income tax, and has operated on essentially the same tax structure—reliant solely on sales and busines...

Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc. bought nearly $1.6 billion worth of Bitcoin —the company’s largest purchase since January—leaning more heavily on a security promising investors an 11.5% annual payout backed by the same cryptocurrency. The company, formerly known as MicroStrategy, bought 22,337 Bitcoin between March 9 and March 15, according to a regulatory filing Monday. Roughly $400 million of the purchase was funded through sales of common stock. The remaining $1.2 billion came from at-the-market sales of its “Stretch” perpetual preferred shares. The dividend-paying securities—similar to bonds that never mature—promise investors a steady yield funded ultimately by Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings. Last week marked Strategy’s largest sale of Stretch since the July initial public offering of the issue. It was also the first time in weeks the firm relied mainly on Stretch to fund its purchases. During that period, Strategy has been marketing the securities as a way for investors and corpora...