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tax avoidance
With Help From Trump-GOP Law, At Least 88 Big US Corporations Paid $0 in Federal Income Tax Last Year
The companies avoided more than $26.7 billion in income taxes last year, enough to give free school lunches to every child in America.
Apr 14, 2026
Dozens of America's most profitable corporations avoided paying any federal income taxes in 2025, according to an analysis out on Tuesday from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The 88 companies—which include Tesla, Southwest Airlines, Live Nation, Palantir, Citigroup, and many others listed in the S&P 500—brought in a collective $105 billion in pretax income last year.
ITEP found that 2025 saw a spike in corporate tax avoidance, enabled in part by new loopholes created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump and by his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the corporate tax rate to 21% from its previous 35%.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to hand the wealthiest 1% of Americans $117 billion in tax cuts this year, while those in the bottom 95% are set to pay more in taxes while facing across-the-board cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
It also allowed multimillion- and billion-dollar corporations to find new ways to avoid paying taxes. More than half of the tax-avoiders listed in the report used a provision in the new tax law allowing companies to immediately write off capital investments, reducing their collective taxes by $11.4 billion.
Pharmaceutical and tech companies, meanwhile, were able to take advantage of tax write-offs for research and development, exempting them from approximately another $4.4 billion.
In total, the corporate tax avoidance documented in 2025 by the researchers helped to rob the public coffers of yet another $26.7 billion, enough to give every public school student a free lunch for a year, according to a University of Missouri analysis of the National School Lunch Program.
The researchers said that the full scale of corporate tax avoidance remains unclear, since corporate tax returns are not publicly available. Some companies were also excluded because they are not part of the S&P 500 or have not yet reported their 2025 taxes.
“These findings are not isolated cases—they reflect systemic deficiencies in the corporate tax code,” said Amy Hanauer, the executive director for ITEP. “Without meaningful reform, profitable corporations will continue to pay less than their fair share.”
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How Billionaire Tax Avoidance Works: The Case of Jeff Bezos
Billionaire tax avoidance stems directly from the reality that America’s tax on capital gain income remains a steeply regressive tax.
Jul 30, 2025
The recent wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez in Venice set off quite the furor over tax avoidance. An enormous banner in the Piazza San Marco put the matter plainly: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax.”
That banner prompted a commentary from Phoebe Liu at Forbes on how much tax Bezos does indeed pay. For the year 2024, according to a Forbes estimate, Bezos paid about $2.7 billion in tax on the gain from his sale of $13.6 billion worth of Amazon stock. That stock—the heart of the Bezos fortune since he started Amazon in 1994—originally cost him no more than $13,600.
In other words, some 99.9999% of the proceeds of the Bezos stock sale last year counted as a taxable long-term capital gain. This Forbes tax estimate took into account charitable contributions of Amazon stock that Bezos likely claimed as a 2024 deduction.
The Bezos $2.7 billion income tax payment, Liu noted in her Forbes analysis, represented only 4.5% of the 2024 increase in his personal net worth—approximately $60 billion—and barely more than 1% of his overall $230 billion net worth.
We have a tax system, in short, that favors the wealthiest Americans and fosters extreme wealth concentration.
Props to Liu for her reporting. She has helped shine a light on how undertaxed America’s billionaires have become even in years when they pay billions of dollars in tax.
But I wonder: What would the reporting have looked like if Bezos had sold all $200 billion or so of his Amazon stock? Would we be reading that he paid $40 billion in tax—a sum equal to over 20% of his net worth—with a suggestion that he paid his fair tax share? Yeah, we probably would. Not necessarily from Liu, but apologists for the ultra-rich would have been all over it.
Which raises the question: Should our view of how much the ultra-rich pay in tax turn on how much of their investments—as a share of their total wealth—they sell in a given year or on how much their overall wealth happens to increase in that specific year?
Bezos, for example, has sold over $600 million of Amazon shares so far this year, with the apparent intention to sell a bunch more. The value of Amazon shares this year has not increased much. He may well pay more in tax on those sales than his wealth increase for the entire year. Would that mean he’s overtaxed? Of course not.
So how can we better understand billionaire tax avoidance? By focusing only on billionaire taxable transactions, without reference to irrelevant data such as their total wealth or the annual increase in their total wealth.
Consider just the Amazon shares Bezos sold last year, shares worth an astounding 1 million times what he had paid for them 30 years earlier. The average annual increase in the value of those shares, when you do the math, turns out to be 58.5%, an incredible performance.
Now assume Bezos paid the full 23.8% tax rate on his gains, without taking those charitable contributions into consideration. That would leave him with $10.36 billion after tax, a total that translates to an after-tax average annual rate of increase of 57.1% and a reduction of less than 2.5% from his pre-tax annual rate of increase.
This means that the maximum federal income tax Bezos could have paid on the gain from his 2024 Amazon stock sales amounts to the same end result as would an annual tax on the increase in value of his Amazon shares of 2.5%, assuming the tax were paid from sale of the stock. And the result would be the same—an effective annual tax rate of 2.5%—had Bezos sold all his Amazon shares last year or if 2024 happened to be a year when his wealth didn’t increase much.
Tax avoidance by billionaires, these numbers help us see, doesn’t essentially come from the amount of income these rich report in a given year compared to their wealth or even the amount of income they report in a year compared to that year’s increase in their wealth. Billionaire tax avoidance stems directly from the reality that America’s tax on capital gain income remains a steeply regressive tax.
As I’ve noted previously, the longer a deep pocket holds an investment and the greater the annual rate of increase in value that investment yields, the lower the effective annual federal income tax rate will be when the investment finally gets sold. The effective annual tax rate on long-term, high-yield investments can end up at less than one-fifth the rate on short-term, low-yield investments.
More than all other taxpayers, our wealthiest find themselves easily able to hold investments for long periods of time. We have a tax system, in short, that favors the wealthiest Americans and fosters extreme wealth concentration.
And if we can’t figure out how to reform that tax system soon, heaven help us.
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How Big Oil Lobbied Its Way Out of Accountability for the LA Fires
"Accountability is an existential threat to their business model, and their business model is an existential threat to all of us, and that’s the bottom line," said Meghan Sahli-Wells, the former mayor of Culver City.
Jan 15, 2025
As devastating wildfires continue to burn in the Los Angeles region on Wednesday—placing tens of thousands of Californians under evacuation orders and causing over $250 billion in economic damages by one estimate—a pair of new reports highlight how fossil fuel companies have dodged responsibility for their role in the destruction and hampered the state's ability to fight back by depriving it of funds.
California's fossil fuel industry deployed lobbying muscle to kill legislation that would compel polluters to pay into a fund that would help prevent disasters and aid cleanup efforts, and has taken advantage of a tax loophole to deprives the state of corporate tax revenue, thereby "putting climate and social programs in peril." In the case of the former, California's biggest fossil fuel trade group, the Western States Petroleum Association, recently launched a digital campaign that appears aimed at throwing cold water on any such legislative efforts.
According to The Guardian, the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act of 2024 appeared on 76% of the 74 lobby filings submitted in 2024 by the oil company Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Association.
The legislation—which didn't make it out of the state senate in 2024—would, if enacted, create a recovery program forcing fossil fuel polluters to pay their "fair share of the damage caused by the sale of their products" during the period of 2000 to 2020, according to the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters.
According to The Guardian, the filings from those two firms that included this specific bill totaled over $30 million—though lobbying laws do not require a breakdown that would make clear how much was spent specifically on the "polluter pay" law.
With Los Angeles burning, there's renewed interest in passing the bill, The Guardian reports, citing supporters of the legislation. But Western States Petroleum Association isn't sitting idly by. On January 8, the group launched ads that suggest measures like the "polluter pay" bill would force them to increase oil prices. The ads, which appear to have been taken down, do "not specifically mention the polluter pay bill, it echoes the 2024 campaign that did," wrote The Guardian.
"Accountability is an existential threat to their business model, and their business model is an existential threat to all of us, and that’s the bottom line," said Meghan Sahli-Wells, the former mayor of Culver City who currently works for the environmental advocacy group Elected Officials To Protect America, told the paper.
Meanwhile, another report from The Climate Center—a think tank and "do-tank" focused on curbing pollution—has thrust a tax loophole long used by multinational oil and gas companies, into the spotlight.
The report released last week details how "years of litigation and lobbying by oil and gas majors like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell Oil" are responsible for a large corporate tax avoidance policy that is known as the "Water's Edge election" that became law in 1986.
The law allows multinational corporations to "elect" avoid taxes on earnings they designate as beyond the "water's edge" of the borders of states in which they operate, according to The Climate Center.
"Closing the loophole as it applies to the oil and gas industry could put anywhere between $75 to $146 million per year back into the state’s budget," the report states.
For context, California closed a $46 billion budget shortfall last year, including by enacting cuts to climate and clean air programs.
"The water's edge tax loophole allows multinational fossil fuel corporations to dodge paying their fair share of taxes that can help fund vital environmental projects, which could include wildfire preparedness," California Assemblymember Damon Connolly (D-12) told the progressive outlet The Lever, the first outlet to report on the findings.
California lawmakers last year passed a bill that took aim at some aspects of the loophole, but an advocacy group whose board of directors includes representative from the oil and gas industry has filed lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the reform, according to the The Climate Center.
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