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Meet the 16 Billionaires Making Bank by Underpaying Their Workers
For detailed data on wages and CEO pay at these and other leading low-wage corporations, see the recent Institute for Policy Studies report "America’s 20 Largest Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis." This article includes updated net worth data from the just-released Forbes 2026 Global Billionaires List.
Walmart
Seven descendants of Walmart founder Sam Walton have accumulated their multi-billion-dollar fortunes off the backs of the giant retailer’s low-wage workers. His eldest son, Rob Walton, leads the pack, with $146 billion. Another billionaire, Drayton McLane, gained entry to this elite club by selling his grocery distribution business to Walmart for a significant share in the retailer.
When corporate resources are funneled into the pockets of those at the top while ordinary employees have to rely on public assistance, we are all subsidizing the executive mansions and private jets.
Median pay at Walmart, the largest US private sector employer, stood at $29,469 in 2024. That’s below the income limits for a family of three to qualify for Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food aid benefits. It’s nowhere near the $59,600 income level needed to afford the US average rent for a two-bedroom apartment.
In addition to median pay figures reported in corporate proxy statements, we gathered data from the small number of state governments that disclose corporations’ use of public assistance programs to subsidize their low wages.
In Nevada, Walmart had 4,574 employees, 29.3% of their employees in that state, enrolled in Medicaid in 2024. In four states (Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan), Walmart had a total of 10,920 employees enrolled in the SNAP food aid program.
The media organization More Perfect Union points out that Walmart not only relies on SNAP to make up for the low wages they pay their workers, but they also benefit when people use food stamps to buy groceries in their stores. According to a Numerator survey covering the 12 months ending July 31, 2025, Walmart ranked No. 1 for SNAP benefit redemption, receiving nearly 26% of all SNAP dollars.
Amazon
Since MacKenzie Scott received 4% of Amazon stock in her 2019 divorce settlement, the ecommerce goliath has had not one but two reps on the billionaire ranking. Scott has become a major philanthropist, but is still sitting on an estimated $28.6 billion. Her ex, Amazon founder and current Trump ally Jeff Bezos, came in fourth in the world in the Forbes list this year, with $224 billion.
Amazon’s typical employees are on another economic planet. Their median pay of $37,181 just barely exceeds the family-of-three income limits for Medicaid and SNAP. With half of Amazon employees earning less than that amount, a significant share of the company’s 1.2 million US employees no doubt have to rely on public assistance.
Indeed, the Nevada state government’s Medicaid report reveals that Amazon had 8,951 employees enrolled in that health program in that state in 2024, making up 48.4% of all of the firm’s employees in Nevada. In the four states that report SNAP enrollee data by employer, Amazon came in second after Walmart, with 9,633 employees receiving those benefits.
Home Depot
Home Depot co-founder and Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank holds an estimated $11.1 billion. His fellow co-founder, Bernard Marcus, died on election day in 2024, after donating $9.4 million to the campaigns of President Donald Trump and other Republicans.
While ranking among the country’s lowest-paying companies, Home Depot has had plenty money to blow on stock buybacks. This is a financial maneuver that artificially inflates the value of a company’s shares—and the stock holdings of wealthy executives and stockholders.
The big-box chain spent $37.9 billion on share repurchases between 2019 and 2024. That sum would have been enough to give each of Home Depot’s 419,600 US employees six annual $15,039 bonuses. Home Depot’s median pay in 2024 stood at just $35,196—less than the $35,631 income limit for a family of three to qualify for Medicaid.
State government data show that Home Depot employees had a total of 2,213 employees enrolled in SNAP food aid in Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan.
Starbucks
Longtime Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has accumulated $3.5 billion in wealth off a company that paid its median earner just $14,674 in 2024. Employee discontent has sparked pro-union elections at more than 570 stores over the past four years. But the company has used various tactics to prevent workers from securing a first contract, including during a period when Schultz returned to his CEO post.
Schultz recently purchased a $44 million penthouse in Surfside, Florida, a state with zero personal income tax.
Taxing away excessive wealth could also encourage business models that share profits equitably with all employees.
Rounding out the low-wage billionaires list are the founders of Best Buy and Chipotle and two descendants of John Tyson, the founder of Tyson Foods, a meat processor with a sizeable immigrant workforce.
The poverty wage business model that is so prevalent in Corporate America works spectacularly well for a handful of wealthy and politically powerful executives and shareholders. For the rest of us, not so much.
When corporate resources are funneled into the pockets of those at the top while ordinary employees have to rely on public assistance, we are all subsidizing the executive mansions and private jets, the massive political spending, and all the other trappings of excessive wealth.
Taxing Excessive Wealth
Lawmakers have introduced several tax proposals to curb the size of billionaire fortunes. Under current law, the ultra rich hold most of their wealth in stock and other financial assets that are not taxable until they are sold. In the meantime, they’re allowed to borrow against these assets to fund their lavish lifestyles and then pass their wealth on to heirs tax-free.
One federal bill to address that loophole, the Billionaires Income Tax Act, would impose an annual tax on billionaires’ gains from tradable assets like stocks, whether or not they sell the asset.
Several other proposals would tax billionaires’ accumulated wealth. For example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) are the lead advocates of the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which would apply a 2% annual tax on the net worth of households and trusts between $50 million and $1 billion and a 3% tax on those with net worth above $1 billion.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) recently introduced a slightly different model that would establish a 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires. This proposal is similar to a California state ballot initiative for a 5% one-time wealth tax on billionaire residents of that state.
Each of these proposals would raise massive revenue for public investments. At the same time, taxing away excessive wealth could also encourage business models that share profits equitably with all employees instead of extracting from those at the bottom to make wealthy executives and shareholders even richer.
End Trump's Chaotic Tariffs and Raise Corporate Tax Rates Instead
The Administration’s Across-the-Board Tariffs Harm the Economy and Burden Households With Low and Moderate Incomes
Beginning in February 2025, the administration announced and implemented sweeping taxes on imported goods, known as tariffs, justifying them in part on the need to raise revenues. The Supreme Court struck down some of these tariffs, but the administration responded by imposing a new set of replacement tariffs under a different authority. These tariffs are still highly significant: as of March 10, the effective tariff rate was 12% compared with 2.6% in early 2025. Underneath this average rate is a complex and highly variable tariff regime that differs considerably by country and type of product and has been subject to frequent changes over the past year.
Tariffs can play a useful role in trade policy as a way to remedy specific trade issues—such as the need to ensure domestic production of goods related to national security—but are highly flawed as a general revenue source because of the economic distortions they create and the burden they place on families with low and moderate incomes. To a much greater extent than other types of taxes, tariffs distort, or alter, households’ and businesses’ decisions about purchasing, investment, and savings in ways that can make them worse off. For example, high tariffs on imported steel encourage US companies to ramp up steel production instead of investing capital and labor into other sectors that might, absent the tariff, generate higher returns.
If tariffs are expanded to replace all or a substantial share of the federal income tax, most households, and especially those with the lowest incomes, would face a massive tax increase, while wealthy households would be substantially better off.
Tariffs can harm the domestic economy in other ways. By raising the price of imported business inputs (that is, goods that are used to make other goods, such as steel used in automobiles and buildings, including apartment buildings), goods manufactured in the US are often more expensive because of tariffs. Even producers of purely domestic goods may increase prices because of reduced competition from tariffed foreign goods. Moreover, the tariffs’ chaotic and haphazard implementation over the past year has created an uncertain environment that is harmful to businesses trying to decide when, whether, or where to invest.
Other countries may also impose their own tariffs on US products (or otherwise retaliate), which can reduce US exports and harm domestic markets, as happened when China paused purchases of US soybeans last year.
Tariffs are regressive because they place a heavier burden on households with low and moderate incomes than on high-income households compared to other taxes. If made permanent, the current tariffs would reduce after-tax incomes of households with incomes in the bottom 10% of the income distribution by about 1.4%, compared with 0.4% for households with incomes in the top 10%, according to Yale Budget Lab. For households struggling to afford to meet their basic needs, this tariff-driven income reduction could have serious consequences: Yale estimates that the administration’s tariffs last year would lead to hundreds of thousands more people living in poverty, with millions more seeing their incomes fall further below the poverty line. Higher tariffs would increase poverty more severely.
Economists generally agree that tariffs are a regressive tax, while federal income taxes are progressive. For example, tariffs are imposed on goods at a flat rate meaning that everyone purchasing those goods pays the same rate regardless of income, instead of a progressive rate structure that ensures high-income households pay higher rates than households with lower incomes.
For this reason, if tariffs are expanded to replace all or a substantial share of the federal income tax, most households, and especially those with the lowest incomes, would face a massive tax increase, while wealthy households would be substantially better off.
Importantly, this calculation ignores the fact that it would be impossible for tariffs to generate enough revenue to replace the income tax: The personal income tax alone generates $2.4 trillion in annual revenue while estimates suggest tariffs could realistically raise a maximum of only about $500 billion.
The Corporate Income Tax Is a Far More Efficient and Progressive Revenue-Raising Option
Increasing revenues by raising the corporate income tax rate would be a far better approach than the president’s harmful tariff scheme. Raising the corporate tax rate—which Republicans slashed in 2017—would raise substantial revenue in a progressive and efficient manner.
While tariffs are a tax on imported goods, including business inputs, the corporate income tax is a tax on corporations’ profits, or their net income after deducting expenses. Notably, a substantial (and growing) share of the corporate tax base consists of so-called “excess profits”—that is, profits above what a firm needs to justify an investment. Taxing those profits is efficient because it would not deter the firm from making break-even investments because they would remain profitable. A study by tax scholar Edward Fox estimated that as much as 96% of the corporate tax fell on excess profits from 1995 to 2013.
More of the corporate tax is falling on excess returns because the amount of those excess profits is rising, in part, due to declining competition and increasing concentration among corporations, which give businesses “market power” that allows them to raise their prices well above their costs. Another reason is that changes in tax policy have effectively exempted more of firms’ normal return on investments from taxation, meaning the corporate tax has applied more to excess profits. For example, the 2017 tax law allowed firms to immediately deduct the full cost of equipment purchases rather than deduct those costs gradually as the value of the investment declines—a change last year’s Republican megabill both made permanent and expanded.
Given the nation’s need for more revenues, policymakers should embrace sound, progressive policies like raising the corporate tax rate.
Some may argue that higher corporate taxes would simply be passed on to consumers through higher prices, but the corporate tax—as a tax on profits—allows businesses to deduct and exempt from taxation key input costs, especially labor. This means that it generally does not have a direct impact on firms’ pricing decisions. The traditional economic concern about raising corporate taxes is not that they raise prices, but that they can reduce investment and thus affect productivity and workers’ wages. Yet, because they often (and increasingly) fall on excess profits, they are less likely to reduce investment and are a relatively efficient source of revenue.
Raising the corporate tax rate would also make the tax system more progressive. Both conventional scoring authorities and outside experts (e.g., the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congressional Budget Office, Department of the Treasury, and the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center) agree that the corporate tax is predominately paid by shareholders and the owners of capital income. The ownership of corporate shares—as with other kinds of wealth—is highly concentrated among households with high net worth; households with net worth in the bottom 50% hold just 1% of equities. Because white households are overrepresented among the wealthy while households of color are overrepresented at the lower end of the wealth distribution due to racial barriers to economic opportunity, raising the corporate tax rate can also help reduce racial wealth inequality.
Evidence from the 2017 tax law supports the view that corporate tax cuts primarily benefit high-income households—and, inversely, that corporate tax increases would fall on those same households. The law cut the corporate tax rate dramatically from 35% to 21%, with people at the top of the income distribution receiving the vast majority of the resulting gain. One study found that people with incomes in the top 10% of the income distribution received 80% of the 2017 law’s corporate tax cuts benefit.
Moreover, raising the corporate tax rate has the potential to raise significant revenues; raising it to 28%—halfway between the current rate and the pre-2017 tax rate—would raise around $1 trillion over 10 years—enough to replace about two-thirds of the current tariffs.
Given the nation’s need for more revenues, policymakers should embrace sound, progressive policies like raising the corporate tax rate, while abandoning harmful tariffs and resoundingly rejecting the president’s disastrous proposal to replace income taxes with massive tariffs.
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