CFOs’ total compensation increased at nearly the same rate as their CEOs’ did, according to a Compensation Advisory Partners (CAP) report that examined the 2025 pay packages of 140 companies with at least $5 billion in revenue for fiscal 2025.

Total compensation rose a median 8% for CFOs and 9% for CFOs, marking “the first time in several years” that the increases were “very close,” according to the report. The pay boosts were “driven by strong performance and increased focus on retention of key talent.”

Specifically, CFO salaries increased a median 3.7% from 2024, compared to a 2.1% increase for CEOs. CFOs’ actual bonuses increased 7.1% (6.5% for CEOs).

The biggest gains in compensation were in long-term incentive (LTI) awards, which CAP noted “increased significantly” for the year (12% for CFOs and 9% for CEOs). These gains were nearly double the YoY increases from 2024 of 7% and 5%, respectively. LTIs made up 63% of CFO pay in 2025, largely consistent with the previous four years.

Retention was a factor in CFO and CEO pay bumps.—AZ

Some massive, and we mean massive, companies are going public right now, which has market experts postulating that 2026 could be called the “year of the mega-IPO.” SpaceX, which went public on June 12 and already has a market cap of nearly $2.4 trillion, will likely be joined by fellow AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI.

Those three are in a class of their own. Executives of the other 99.9% of companies weighing an IPO or that have filed for one have far different calculations to make than Elon Musk or Sam Altman do. As Ali Ghodsi, CEO of AI data platform Databricks, recently told Bloomberg: “We will be a public company. I just think this is a terrible year to go public.”

What’s keeping companies like Databricks private, besides the expected stream of gargantuan tech IPOs? Ro Sokhi, a partner at UHY, homed in on two factors: abundant funding opportunities in the private markets and an uncertain macroeconomic environment.

“I’d say the broader reason for companies staying private longer is really that companies no longer need to be in the public markets to access capital like they once did,” Sokhi told CFO Brew. Companies may also be waiting for “a better window” to go public, he added, instead of doing it at a time of inflation, high interest rates, and tariffs.

How one CFO is using an IPO as a “galvanizing” event.—DL, AZ

TL;DR: Meta’s CTO admitted in an internal memo this week that the company did an “atrocious job” rolling out its AI reorg, per a new Wired report—leading morale to tank. And the planned fixes essentially amount to more social events and better snacks. Meta is the year’s starkest example of a firm trying to transform into a leaner, AI-first workforce, and it’s showing us the biggest hurdle: keeping its remaining employees from revolting.

What happened: While conceding that it botched its explanation of the AI shift, the company has largely stood by the shake-up itself. To recap: In April, the firm announced it would lay off 8,000 people, and then soon after said it would reassign 7,000 more. That reshuffle fed a new division called Applied AI, where staff weren’t recruited so much as conscripted. And the work itself—generating coding puzzles and training data to sharpen Meta’s models—is reportedly so mind-numbing that one worker called Applied AI “literally the gulag.”

The morale-boosting fixes the company has proposed so far: capping managers at about 20 direct reports (down from 50), better “microkitchens” in the office, beefed-up event and travel budgets, and letting Applied AI engineers apply for other Meta roles. (The employee keystroke-and-click tracking, though, is mostly still on.)

Tech Brew has more on the AI reorg one Meta exec called “atrocious.”—WK