The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday said two related Robinhood broker-dealers agreed to pay $45 million in combined penalties to settle administrative charges that they violated more than 10 separate securities law provisions related to their brokerage operations.

The violations by Robinhood Securities LLC and Robinhood Financial LLC are related to failures to report suspicious trading in a timely manner, failing to implement adequate identity theft protections and failing to adequately address unauthorized access to Robinhood computer systems, the SEC said.

The two Robinhood entities also had longstanding failures to maintain and preserve electronic communications, failed to retain copies of operational databases, and failed to maintain some customer communications as legally required between 2020 and 2021, according to the agency.

The SEC said that Robinhood Securities alone failed for more than five years “to provide complete and accurate securities trading information, known as blue sheet data” to the agency.

According to an SEC order made public Monday, “During the [Electronic Blue Sheets] Relevant Period, in response to requests from the Commission, Robinhood Securities made at least 11,849 EBS submissions to the Commission that contained inaccurate information or omissions, resulting from eleven types of errors.”

“Those errors resulted in the misreporting of EBS data for at least 392 million transactions,” the order said.

Sanjay Wadhwa, the acting director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement, said, “It is essential to the Commission’s broader efforts to protect investors and promote the integrity and fairness of our markets that broker-dealers satisfy their legal obligations when carrying out their various market functions.”

“Today’s order finds that two Robinhood firms failed to observe a broad array of significant regulatory requirements, including failing to accurately report trading activity, comply with short sale rules, submit timely suspicious activity reports, maintain books and records, and safeguard customer information,” Wadhwa said.

Robinhood Markets General Counsel Lukas Moskowitz, in a statement, said, “We are pleased to resolve these matters. As the SEC’s order acknowledges, most of these are historical matters that our broker-dealers have previously addressed.”

“We are well-positioned to continue leading the industry in developing the innovative products and services our customers want and need to participate in U.S. and global financial markets,” Moskowitz said. “We look forward to working with the SEC under a new administration.” 

As the boutique fitness sector starts to buckle, Barry’s Bootcamp on Monday announced new investment from Princeton Equity Group.

“The reason why this [boutique fitness] works for Barry’s is that our positioning in the marketplace is premium,” said Joey Gonzalez, Barry’s co-CEO, in an interview with CNBC. “We always want to minimize risks to any sort of brand dilution, and we only ever want to elevate the Barry’s experience.”

Gonzalez said this funding round will be focused on investing in client experience and brand positioning in a highly saturated industry. Barry’s offers high-intensity running, lifting and training classes in its trademark red-lit rooms.

Barry’s has 89 studios globally that saw more than 7 million visits in 2024.

Princeton is a franchisor and consumer services-focused private equity firm with $1.2 billion in assets under management. It has invested in other wellness brands such as spa chain Massage Envy and athletic training facility D1 Training.

The size of the investment was not disclosed.

The fresh capital for Barry’s adds to a list of private equity investments dating back nearly two decades from firms including LightBay Capital and North Castle Partners.

Gonzalez said Barry’s will use the investment in part to fund expansion in 12 U.S. cities this year, including Charleston, South Carolina; Hoboken, New Jersey; and Salt Lake City, as well as locations in Madrid, Athens and Dublin.

″[This partnership] is enabling us to consolidate our operations in the UK and Canada,” Gonzalez said. “We will now be overseeing operations in these countries where we can foster a closely knit community and create efficiencies.”

The broader global boutique fitness studio market was valued at nearly $48 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow to $86 billion in 2030, according to estimates from Research and Markets. Still, several high-profile brands have struggled to grow their customer base.

Xponential Fitness, a franchisor of health and wellness brands, divested from two struggling boutique chains — Stride Fitness and Row House — last year.

Jefferies analyst Randal Konik cited industry headwinds including macroeconomic concerns that could cause a pullback in consumer spending, and said fitness has proven to be more need-based with more people prioritizing health and wellness.

“Tailwinds will be the focus on health and wellness coming out of Covid,” Konik said, “as well as a move towards strength training, [which] has lifted demand for all types of fitness classes and gym membership.”

Piper Sandler analyst Korinne Wolfmeyer cited “uncertainty around unit growth” at Xponential as one of the main reasons to stay on the sidelines of the stock.

Gonzalez said his company is bucking the trend.

“I think of Barry’s as one of the originals, and a very back-to-basics approach to fitness with efficacy at the heart,” said Gonzalez. “What Barry’s has really done is stick to our core competency: fitness experience, immersive experience, member experience.”

Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment announced on Monday a joint venture with Comcast Spectacor to build a new arena in South Philadelphia for the NBA’s 76ers and the NHL’s Flyers.

The deal represents a reversal from previous plans to build an arena in the Center City district of Philadelphia.

Harris Blitzer and Comcast Spectacor have entered into a binding agreement for a 50-50 stake in the project at South Philadelphia’s Sports Complex, which is slated to open in 2031. It will include the revitalization of Market East in Center City, the original proposed location for an arena. In December, the Philadelphia 76ers received approval to build a $1.3 billion arena downtown after more than two years of contentious negotiations.

The deal announced Monday will give Comcast a minority stake in the 76ers and naming rights to the arena. The Philadelphia-based company will also join HBSE’s bid to bring a WNBA team to the Liberty City.

Comcast Spectacor is already majority owner of the Philadelphia Flyers.

“From the start, we envisioned a project that would be transformative for our city and deliver the type of experience our fans deserve,” said HBSE’s Josh Harris, David Blitzer and David Adelman in a statement. “By coming together with [Comcast CEO Brian Roberts] and Comcast, this partnership ensures Philadelphia will have two developments instead of one, creating more jobs and real, sustainable economic opportunity.”

In committing to both investments, the companies say they will create thousands of jobs and generate billions of dollars in economic activity for the region.

“This has the potential to benefit our city for generations to come,” said Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker during a news conference Monday.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of CNBC.

Barry Diller’s IAC said Monday that its board approved the spinoff of Angi, the home improvement marketplace the company acquired in 2017.

IAC said it expects the transaction to close in the second quarter of the year. The two companies will post their respective fourth-quarter results when IAC reports on Feb. 11. Angi was founded in 1995 as Angie’s List, which went public on the Nasdaq in 2011.

As part of the spinoff, IAC CEO Joey Levin will leave his role and become an advisor to the company. Levin will also take on a new role as Angi’s executive chairman, serving as the marketplace’s senior executive alongside CEO Jeff Kip, IAC said.

“Joey Levin has been an exemplary leader of IAC, creating significant value during his nearly decade-long tenure as IAC CEO,” Diller, IAC’s chairman, said in a statement.

Upon Levin’s vacancy, IAC will operate without a new CEO, the company said. IAC’s top execs will report directly to Diller, as will publisher Dotdash Meredith, the company’s largest business. The rest of IAC’s units will report to operating chief Christopher Halpin.

IAC has previously used no-CEO structures when reorganizing its businesses. Most recently, in 2013, then-CEO Greg Blatt stepped down from the role to become chairman of the newly formed Match Group division.

“Each of IAC and Angi has a vigorous future, and I expect to remain an active participant in both,” Levin said in a statement.

As part of the spinoff, IAC shareholders will get direct ownership of Angi, IAC said.

IAC first announced it was considering a spinoff of Angi in November. At the time, the company said Angi’s revenue declined 16% year over year to $296.7 million during the third quarter. The company attributed the slide to reduced sales and marketing spend, which led to a decrease in service requests and lower acquisition of new professionals.

IAC acquired Angie’s List in a deal valued at more than $500 million. It merged the site with HomeAdvisor, creating a new public company. Angi currently has a market cap of about $770 million, and IAC owns 85% of it.

The spinoff has been under consideration for several years, but IAC postponed the effort in 2019 as it completed the Match Group transaction. Match owns dating services including Tinder, Match and Hinge.

IAC has become known for incubating businesses and spinning them off into separate companies. It’s done the same with Expedia, Ticketmaster and LendingTree, among others.

Microsoft is forming a new group focused on developing AI apps and providing tools for third-party customers, the company announced Monday.

The new group will be led by Jay Parikh, the former CEO of cybersecurity startup Lacework and former global head of engineering at Meta. The group will be called Core AI — Platform and Tools, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a memo to employees that was also published as a blog post. The mission, he said, is “to build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents.”

The announcement comes 10 months after Microsoft hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Copilot AI initiatives. In that role, Suleyman is an executive vice president, reporting directly to Nadella.

In Monday’s post, Nadella said Parikh will work closely with Suleyman as well as Scott Guthrie, who runs cloud, technology chief Kevin Scott and other top tech leaders at the company. Parikh joined Microsoft in October as an executive vice president, also reporting to the CEO.

Artificial intelligence has become the primary theme in tech since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and Microsoft, as the principal investor in OpenAI, has been at the center of the boom. Microsoft counts on OpenAI’s large language models for internal AI use when it comes to areas like content generation and code creation and also serves as the startup’s main cloud partner.

At the same time, Microsoft is developing products and tools that compete with some OpenAI services. Over the summer, Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in its SEC filings, and Nadella used the phrase “cooperation tension” while discussing the relationship with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on a podcast released last month.

“Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors,” Nadella wrote in Monday’s memo.

The new group will bring together people working on developer and AI platforms, as well as teams from the Office of the CTO, Nadella said.

“Our success in this next phase will be determined by having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure,” he wrote.

Parikh joined Microsoft from Lacework, which had been a rapid growing and high-profile startup, soaring to a valuation of $8.3 billion in 2022, seven years after its founding. However, the company’s fortunes turned when the market shifted away from risk, and Lacework was forced to dramatically cut staff to try and turn profitable. In August, security software vendor Fortinet closed its acquisition of Lacework for $149 million.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will hold off enforcing a requirement laid out in an executive order this month that Nippon Steel abandon its $14.9 billion bid for U.S. Steel, the companies said on Saturday.

President Joe Biden blocked Nippon Steel’s planned acquisition of U.S. Steel on national security grounds on Jan. 3, and his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week that the proposed deal had received a “thorough analysis” by interagency review body, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

The delay will give the courts time to review a legal challenge brought by the parties earlier this month against Biden’s order. The parties previously had 30 days to unwind their transaction.

“We are pleased that CFIUS has granted an extension to June 18, 2025 of the requirement in President Biden’s Executive Order that the parties permanently abandon the transaction,” the companies said in a joint statement.

“We look forward to completing the transaction, which secures the best future for the American steel industry and all our stakeholders,” they said.

U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel alleged in a lawsuit on Monday that the CFIUS review was prejudiced by Biden’s longstanding opposition to the deal, denying them of a right to a fair review. They asked a federal appeals court to overturn Biden’s decision to allow them a fresh review to secure another shot at closing the merger.

The U.S. Treasury secretary chairs the CFIUS panel, which screens foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies and other investment deals for national security concerns. CFIUS normally decides directly on cases or submits recommendations to the president, but in the U.S. Steel-Nippon Steel case, the panel failed to reach consensus on whether Biden should to approve or reject it, leaving the decision to him.

Both Biden and his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, had voiced opposition to the Japanese company acquiring the American steelmaker as the candidates courted union votes in the November election.

CFIUS has rarely rejected deals involving the Group of Seven closely allied countries, which include Japan.

Four years after exiting bankruptcy, Chuck E. Cheese is making a comeback, thanks to a dramatic makeover to introduce its games and pizza to a new generation.

In June 2020, just as some states began lifting their pandemic lockdowns, Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company CEC Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It emerged from bankruptcy months later with new leadership and freed from about $705 million in debt.

Even when Covid subsided, the company faced another existential threat: figuring out how to entertain children — and their paying parents — in the age of iPads and smartphones. The company has spent more than $300 million in recent years tackling that challenge — and the investment has started to pay off.

CEC Entertainment, which also includes Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings and Peter Piper Pizza, has seen eight straight months of same-store sales growth and is no longer in debt, according to CEO Dave McKillips. The company isn’t publicly traded, but it discloses its financial results to its bond investors.

CEC Entertainment’s annual revenue grew from $912 million in 2019 to roughly $1.2 billion in 2023, according to Reuters. And that’s with fewer open Chuck E. Cheese locations. The chain has 470 U.S. locations currently, down from 537 in 2019.

Sustaining the growth won’t be easy. Like all restaurants, the chain has to win over consumers who are eating out less often as costs rise. Chuck E. Cheese also has to draw the attention of children and parents in a fragmented media market.

Since Atari founder Nolan Bushnell opened its first location in 1977 in San Jose, Chuck E. Cheese has grown to become a staple of many childhoods, known for its pizza, birthday parties and animatronic mouse mascot and band.

After exiting bankruptcy, Chuck E. Cheese and its stores underwent a makeover, giving today’s locations a very different look. Gone are the animatronics, SkyTube tunnels and physical tickets of yore. Instead, trampolines, a mobile app and floor-to-ceiling JumboTrons have replaced them.

Those changes came from McKillips, a former Six Flags executive. He joined the company in January 2020, just months before lockdowns would temporarily shutter all of its locations. By April 2021, the company raised $650 million in bonds, which it’s been spending on its restaurants.

“The company was capital-starved for many, many years. It had not been remodeled. It had not been touched,” he said.

Apollo Global Management took Chuck E. Cheese private in 2014. Five years later, CEC Entertainment tried to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. But the deal was scrapped without explanation.

The new cash prompted a frank look at the Chuck E. Cheese model — including its iconic animatronic band, featuring Charles Entertainment Cheese and his friends.

“We pulled out the animatronics. It was a hot debate for many legacy bands, but kids were consuming entertainment in such a different way, you know, growing up with screens and ever-changing bite-sized entertainment,” McKillips said.

The chain also redid its menu, upgrading to scratch-made pizzas. Kidz Bop became an official music partner. Other kid-friendly brands, like Paw Patrol, Marvel and Nickelodeon, became partners for its games.

And then came the trampolines.

“We found one glaring opportunity for us … active play,” McKillips said. He added that growth in the family entertainment category is largely coming from activity-based businesses, like trampoline parks and rock-climbing walls.

The company first tested the trampolines in Brooklyn and then in Miami, St. Louis and Orlando. As of December, 450 Chuck E. Cheese locations now have kid-sized trampolines. And unlike the SkyTubes or ball pits of the past, customers have to pay extra to use trampolines. (The ball pits disappeared from Chuck E. Cheese locations in 2011, while SkyTubes lasted roughly another decade.)

After the company spent $230 million to remodel Chuck E. Cheese locations, McKillips now says that process is finished.

“We needed to fix the product. The product is fixed,” he said.

Reintroducing customers to the brand — especially adults who only know the Chuck E. Cheese of their own childhoods — has been another focus.

“You come in around three years old, you leave around eight or nine and you don’t come back for 15 years. We had to go and speak to a whole new generation of kids, and we were off-air during Covid. We had to build all that,” McKillips said.

For example, Chuck E. Cheese’s birthday business, one of the company’s best marketing tools, struggled in the wake of the pandemic. Today, it’s back at pre-pandemic levels.

And as Chuck E. Cheese started seeing the pullback in consumer spending that hit many restaurants last year, from McDonald’s to Outback Steakhouse, the chain had to come up with a way to appeal to the value-oriented customer.

Over the summer, Chuck E. Cheese launched a two-month tiered subscription program that offered unlimited visits and discounts on food, drinks and games. The membership encouraged families to visit more often than the typical two or three annual visits. The subscription starts at $7.99 a month, with additional tiers at $11.99 and $29.99 that promise steeper discounts and more games played.

“In 2023, we sold 79,000 passes. This year, we sold close to 400,000 passes during the same time period,” McKillips said, referring to 2024. “This shows that the value consumer will seek and will spend if they’re getting great return on their spend.”

In the fall, the company followed up on the success of the passes with a 12-month membership and has already sold more than 100,000 of them.

McKillips’ biggest dreams for the chain and its mascots lie outside of the four walls of its restaurants.

“There’s another cute mouse down in Orlando that does this pretty well, so I see us in the same way, but we’re just getting started right now,” McKillips said.

In addition to 30 licensing deals for everything from frozen pizzas to apparel, Chuck E. Cheese is also exploring different entertainment partnerships that would make its mouse mascot a starring character, according to McKillips.

And that’s not all. The company has looked into the possibility of a game show. It has a prolific YouTube channel, with videos focused on its characters, not its pizza or games.

Plus, Chuck E. Cheese himself has six albums available on streaming platforms, and his band plays live, choreographed concerts.

“My dream would be to have a feature movie,” McKillips said.

McDonald’s will shutter three locations of its drinks-focused spinoff brand, CosMc’s.

To test the concept, the fast-food giant opened its first CosMc’s location more than a year ago in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook, followed by six more in Texas. McDonald’s has converted larger namesake restaurants into CosMc’s, in addition to building smaller prototype locations.

The smaller stores work better for the test, the company said Thursday. As a result, McDonald’s will close three of its larger format CosMc’s locations and open two more small Texas restaurants. The company didn’t disclose the locations for either the openings or closures, although CosMc’s website says a store is coming soon to Allen, Texas.

McDonald’s also shared other early learnings from the pilot on Thursday. Savory hash browns are the top-selling food — at any time of day — followed by McPops, the chain’s mini filled doughnuts. Best-selling drinks include the Island Pick Me Up Punch, Churro Cold Brew Frappe and the Sour Energy Burst.

The CosMc’s test will continue for the “foreseeable future,” according to the company.

McDonald’s created CosMc’s as its entry point into the growing “afternoon beverage pick-me-up occasion.”

While CosMc’s menu features some McDonald’s classics, it also offers a host of new items playing off other beverage and snacking trends, like its iced turmeric spiced lattes, tropical spiceade and pretzel bites. Starbucks, Dutch Bros. and bubble tea chain Kung Fu Tea have found success with younger consumers by offering customizable cold drinks.

The name for the new brand comes from CosMc, a McDonaldland mascot that appeared in advertisements in the late 1980s and early 1990s. CosMc is an alien from outer space who craves McDonald’s food.

While it’s unclear just how much McDonald’s plans to grow CosMc’s, it’s still a miniscule part of the burger giant’s overall U.S. footprint. The company has more than 13,500 U.S. restaurants. Still, McDonald’s is hoping to learn more about its CosMc’s customers; last year, it rolled out a loyalty program specific to CosMc’s.

Meta on Friday told employees that its plans to end a number of internal programs designed to increase the company’s hiring of diverse candidates, the latest dramatic change ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s second White House term.

Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of people, made the announcement on the company’s Workplace internal communications forum.

Among the changes, Meta is ending the company’s “Diverse Slate Approach” of considering qualified candidates from underrepresented groups for its open roles. The company is also putting an end to its diversity supplier program and its equity and inclusion training programs. Gale also announced the disbanding of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, team, and she said that Meta Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams will move into a new role focused on accessibility and engagement.

Several Meta employees responded to Gale’s post with comments criticizing the new policy.

“If you don’t stand by your principles when things get difficult, they aren’t values. They’re hobbies,” one employee posted in a comment that got reaction from more than 600 colleagues.

The DEI policy change follows a number of sweeping policy reversals by the social media company this month. Last week, Meta replaced global affairs head Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a veteran at the company with longstanding ties to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced a new speech policy that included bringing an end to the company’s third-party fact-checking program.

Axios was first to report the DEI changes at the social media company. Meta didn’t immediately provide a comment.

You can read Gale’s memo, which CNBC obtained, in full below:

Hi all,

I wanted to share some changes we’re making to our hiring, development, and procurement practices. Before getting into details, there is some important background to lay out:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms long standing principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term “DEI” has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.

At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities which ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone. On top of that, we’ve always believed that no one should be given — or deprived — of opportunities because of protective characteristics, and that has not changed.

Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we’re making the following changes:

On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop using the Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds to build products that work for everyone.

We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.

We are sunsetting our supplier diversity effort within our broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those who are part of the supplier diversity program.

Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.

We will no longer have a team focused on DEI. Maxine Williams is taking on a new role at Meta focused on accessibility and engagement.

What remains the same are the principles we’ve used to guide our People Practices:

We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone.

We build the best teams with the most talented people. This means sourcing people from a range of candidate pools but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics, (e.g., race, gender, etc.). We will always evaluate people as individuals.

We drive consistency in employment practices to ensure fairness and objectivity for all. We do not provide preferential treatment, extra opportunities or unjustified credit to anyone based on protected characteristics. Nor will we devalue impact based on these characteristics.

We build connection and community. We support our employee communities, people who use our products and those in the communities. We operate our employee community groups (MRGs) continue to be open to all.

Meta has the privilege to serve billions of people every day. It is important to us that our products are accessible to all, and useful in promoting economic growth and opportunity around the world. We continue to be focused on serving everyone and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday that World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Vince McMahon will pay more than $1.7 million in relation to charges that he failed to disclose payment agreements related to sexual assault charges.

Meanwhile, a woman suing McMahon and the WWE said she was pressing on with her civil case related to the allegations.

The SEC said McMahon circumvented WWE internal accounting controls and caused material misstatements in the company’s 2018 and 2021 financial statements.

The SEC added that McMahon agreed to the settlement without admitting or denying its findings. He will pay a $400,000 civil penalty and reimburse WWE approximately $1,331,000. 

“Company executives cannot enter into material agreements on behalf of the company they serve and withhold that information from the company’s control functions and auditor,” Thomas P. Smith Jr., Associate Regional Director in the New York Regional Office, said in a statement.

McMahon released the following statement Friday:

“The case is closed. Today ends nearly three years of investigation by different governmental agencies. There has been a great deal of speculation about what exactly the government was investigating and what the outcome would be. As today’s resolution shows, much of that speculation was misguided and misleading. In the end, there was never anything more to this than minor accounting errors with regard to some personal payments that I made several years ago while I was CEO of WWE. I’m thrilled that I can now put all this behind me.”

Last month, U.S. prosecutors indicated they would continue a criminal investigation into McMahon while a civil case being brought by a former WWE employee alleging sexual assault and trafficking went forward. 

A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An attorney for Janel Grant, a former WWE employee who filed the civil case, said in a statement that Grant intended to press on with her suit against McMahon, WWE and John Laurinaitis, a former company executive.

“During his time leading WWE, Vince McMahon acted as if rules did not apply to him, and now we have confirmation that he repeatedly broke the law to cover up his horrifying behavior, including human trafficking,’ said the attorney, Ann Callis.

‘The SEC’s charges prove that the NDA Vince McMahon coerced Ms. Grant into signing violates the law, and therefore her case must be heard in court. While prosecutors for the Southern District of New York continue their criminal investigation, we look forward to bringing forward new evidence in our civil case about the sexual exploitation Ms. Grant endured at WWE by Vince McMahon and John Laurinaitis.”

The SEC alleges McMahon failed to disclose one $3 million payment paid to a former WWE employee — and another $7.5 million paid to a female independent contractor — in exchange for their not filing claims against him.

As a result, the agency said, the WWE overstated its 2018 net income by approximately 8% and its 2021 net income by approximately 1.7%. 

The SEC did not name either payment recipient. In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported McMahon had paid $3 million to a former WWE employee to quash sexual assault allegations.

Two years later, that employee, Grant, filed explosive sexual assault and trafficking allegations against McMahon and WWE, prompting McMahon to step down as executive chairman of TKO, the WWE’s parent company, and relinquished all roles with WWE.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that McMahon has paid as much as $12 million over 16 years to suppress various allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity.

The settlement comes as Linda McMahon, Vince McMahon’s wife and former WWE CEO, prepares for Senate confirmation hearings to become education secretary in President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration.

CORRECTION (Jan. 10, 2025, 12:50 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the last name of one of the former WWE employees who filed a civil case against Vince McMahon. She is Janel Grant, not Janel Hill.