ProPublica's IRS Files Reveal How Billionaires Like Bezos and Musk Avoid Federal Income Tax
By
Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel
Summary
ProPublica obtained a massive trove of IRS data revealing how America's wealthiest billionaires — including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and George Soros — often pay little to no federal income tax despite their enormous and growing wealth. The investigation exposes how the ultra-rich use legal tax avoidance strategies, such as holding wealth in appreciating assets rather than selling them (and thus realizing taxable gains), borrowing against assets, and exploiting loopholes in the tax code. The article details specific tax payments (and non-payments) by billionaires over multiple years, compares their reported income to their actual wealth growth, and examines the systemic issues in a tax system that allows the wealthiest to pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class workers.
Source
bskyProPublica's IRS Files Reveal How Billionaires Like Bezos and Musk Avoid Federal Income Taxpropublica.orgKey quotes
· 4 pulledIn 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world's richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes.
In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.
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