Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) is congratulated by his fellow Republicans after signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during an enrollment ceremony in the Rayburn Room at the US Capitol on July 3, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The companies avoided more than $26.7 billion in income taxes last year, enough to give free school lunches to every child in America.
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.”
Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, speaks during an event on November 6, 2025 in Miami, Florida.(Photo by Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images for America Business Forum)
“Congress made a choice: cut assistance for the most vulnerable to double down on a tax code already favoring dominant firms,” said one progressive think tank.
The tax law that congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump enacted last summer has proved to be a massive boon for Amazon, slashing the corporate behemoth’s 2025 tax bill even as its profits surged and it moved ahead with mass layoffs that have cost 30,000 workers their jobs since October.
Citing a new securities filing, the Wall Street Journalreported Friday that Amazon’s “current US taxes, an accounting measure of taxes incurred last year, declined to $1.2 billion from $9 billion” while the company’s “pretax US profit increased by 44.5%, to $89.5 billion. On a cash basis, the company paid $2.8 billion in federal income taxes last year after paying more than $7 billion in each of the prior two years.”
The 87% decline in Amazon’s federal tax bill for 2025 was largely attributable to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s corporate-friendly depreciation tax breaks.
The new securities filing comes just days after Amazon confirmed it axed 16,000 corporate jobs as part of what’s believed to be a sweeping effort to replace workers with robots and artificial intelligence models in the coming years.
The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, noted that the tax benefits that Amazon and other giant corporations are raking in “didn’t come free.”
“The same law slashed Medicaid and the [Affordable Care Act] and is now exacerbating our medical debt crisis,” the organization wrote on social media. “Congress made a choice: cut assistance for the most vulnerable to double down on a tax code already favoring dominant firms.”
In a statement on Friday, Amazon—founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos—said its dramatically lower tax bill “reflects… changes by Congress” purportedly aimed at encouraging “greater investment in the American economy, its innovation, and its workers.”
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) noted Friday that Amazon is one of four companies that “have now disclosed that they collectively received $51 billion in federal tax breaks in 2025, much of that likely from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was signed into law by Trump over the summer.”
“The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in US profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9% of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero,” wrote ITEP’s Matthew Gardner. “That amounts to a collective tax savings of $51 billion last year for these four giant multinational corporations, versus what they would have paid if they paid the full 21% federal corporate income tax rate.”
“ Tax cuts pushed through by the Trump administration last year and in 2017 have made it possible for the fastest-growing companies in the world to pay record-low federal income tax rates on their income,” Gardner added. “The tax avoidance of these four companies alone blew a $51 billion hole in the federal budget last year, and this is likely just the tip of the iceberg.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk speaks during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on January 22, 2026. (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress “have allowed a hugely profitable corporation to avoid paying even a dime of federal income tax on their 2025 US profits.”
Tesla, the electric car company led by former Trump administration special government employee Elon Musk, released its annual financial report Thursday, showing that it doubled its yearly income in 2025 over the previous year and brought in $5.7 billion.
The company, whose CEO spent several months rooting out what he claimed was fraud and waste across the federal government, reported “precisely zero current federal income tax” on the billions it made, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).
The group explained that Tesla used accelerated depreciation, reducing the value of its capital assets, while also slashing its tax bill with tax breaks for its executive stock options.
Research and development tax credits netted $352 million in additional tax savings, and the company used “net operating losses stored up from previous years to offset current year income, although it’s hard to know how much of that affects US income rather than foreign income,” said ITEP.
NEW: Tesla did not pay any federal income tax in 2025.
Elon Musk’s company received over $1.1 billion in tax breaks from American taxpayers last year alone.
Analyzing the financial report, ITEP found that Tesla received over $1.1 billion in federal income tax breaks, paid for by US taxpayers, last year alone—after paying 0.4% of its US profits in federal income taxes over the previous three years.
Over that time period, said ITEP, “the Elon Musk-led company reported $12.58 billion of U.S. income on which its current federal tax was just $48 million… The company reported an effective federal income tax rate of 0.4%. This is a tiny fraction of the 21% tax rate profitable corporations are supposed to pay under the law.”
The most it paid in taxes over the past three years was in 2023, when Tesla paid $48 million, at the federal effective tax rate of 1.2%. That was still just a fraction of the $823 million it would have paid if it had paid the federal corporate tax rate. In 2023, the company enjoyed $775 million in tax breaks.
The company’s income tax payments worldwide in 2025 totaled $1.2 billion, with more than $1 billion going to China and other foreign governments. Tesla paid $28 million to the US government, “presumably related to tax years before 2025,” said ITEP.
The organization noted that the “billion-dollar tax break” enjoyed by Tesla does not appear to be illegal.
However, ITEP said, it illustrates how the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, by passing changes to corporate tax laws in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) last summer, “have allowed a hugely profitable corporation to avoid paying even a dime of federal income tax on their 2025 US profits.”
The organization warned last summer that special business tax breaks included in the OBBBA, including a reinstatement of bonus depreciation and new international rules, would cost the US government $165 billion in revenue in 2026.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.A parody ‘Tesla – The Swasticar’ advert posted at a London bus stop. Photograph: People vs Elon
Larry Ellison speaking at a conference. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The pending purchase of TikTok, blessed by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, once again sets off alarm bells regarding the marriage of economic, geopolitical, and military interests.
Launched in 2017 by the private Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok quickly became one of the most important social networks on the planet. By early 2025, it had 1.6 billion active users, more than half of them outside China, of whom an estimated 170 million are North American; 1 in 5 people in the US get their news from this network, 4 in 10 among the 18-29 age group. Today, it is the fastest-growing platform among the younger segments of the global population.
The US government has waged a long battle to force ByteDance to sell the US branch of TikTok to a group of “domestic” capitalists, citing national security concerns and threatening to ban the platform in the US if the deal did not go through. On September 25, the White House announced through an Executive Order signed by Trump, “Save TikTok by Protecting National Security”, the terms under which the transaction would take place. According to the document, the app in the US “will be majority-owned and controlled by US persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary, as ByteDance Ltd. and its affiliates will own less than 20% of the entity, with the remainder held by certain investors.” Who are these mysterious “certain investors” that the Executive Order does not directly mention?
None other than a consortium led by the giant Texas-based company Oracle, which already stored TikTok data in the US. Its main shareholder is an 81-year-old American tycoon who, unlike Elon Musk, is relatively unknown to the public: Larry Ellison. Ellison, in addition to being the new owner, would also take on key roles in managing security, data, and algorithm auditing. In a nutshell, he will be the new boss of the vertical video platform in the United States, a company valued at USD 14 billion. But perhaps the most relevant aspect of the case is not the amount of the transaction, but its long-term implications for power. As a BBC article states, “Investors will control the algorithm that powers the US version of TikTok, and Americans will occupy six of the seven seats on the board of directors that will oversee it.”
Why is Larry Ellison’s role (geo)politically relevant, and what does Israel have to do with it?
What is admitted need not be proved, as the old adage goes. The day after the announcement, before an audience of podcasters and TikTokers at the Israeli consulate in New York, a blunt Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Weapons change over time; the most important ones are social media,” adding that the purchase of TikTok “is the most important purchase being made right now.” A purchase that, incidentally, had been preceded a month earlier by the appointment of Erica Mindel, a US citizen and former Israeli military instructor, as the company’s new Director of Public Policy for Hate Speech. So did Israel buy TikTok? It depends on how you look at it. The key lies with Larry Ellison and his ties to the genocidal state. So who is this Ellison?
The owner of Oracle – cloud applications, databases, and servers, with 160,000 employees around the globe – is currently the second richest person on the planet (behind only Musk), with a fortune valued at USD 350 billion, according to Forbes. He lives on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he bought in 2012 for USD 300 million; he is a shareholder in X and Tesla; he owns almost 50% of the media giant Paramount-Skydance (including CBS), valued at USD 28 billion. An interesting fact provided by Forbes: “Ellison never finished college. He started out creating databases for the CIA.” His trusted business partner: Safra Catz, Oracle’s CEO since 2014, born in Israel and, like Ellison, a personal friend of … Netanyahu. According to a press release, “a few months before the start of the genocidal war in Gaza, Catz met with Netanyahu to discuss the expansion of Oracle’s projects in the Israeli-occupied territories.” But this is not an isolated incident. The close relationship between the new owner of TikTok and Israel goes back a long way, so much so that on one occasion Ellison even offered Netanyahu a seat on Oracle’s board of directors.
According to data provided by the BDS Movement, in 2019, Oracle leased an underground data center in Har Hotzvim, Jerusalem, to provide Israeli banks, health funds, and military forces with AI processing and information storage services; in 2021, it became the first multinational technology company to sell cloud services to Israel within the occupied territories; in 2022, it hosted soldiers and software developers from the Israeli army’s C41 Corp. to learn how to use Oracle’s cloud for military purposes…
It is no coincidence that Catz, Oracle’s all-powerful CEO, states that “for employees, it’s clear: if you’re not pro-US or pro-Israel, don’t work here”; nor is it surprising that some of her employees commented to The Intercept that “the atmosphere is horrible, people are terrified to even mention Palestine.” According to the same source, as soon as Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza began in October 2023, Catz demanded that the inscription “Oracle Stands with Israel” appear on all company screens in more than 180 countries. In the same context of the aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, Oracle developed the “Words of Iron” project, in collaboration with Israeli ministries, “to help the country elevate pro-Israel content and counter critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.” In other words, a weapon at the service of propaganda, in that theater of operations that has now become fundamental, as Netanyahu himself knows: cognitive warfare. The Intercept also reports that a year ago, Oracle partnered with one of Israel’s largest defense companies, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, on an AI project to provide “fighters with rapid, actionable information on the battlefield.” In other words, war on the ground.
The relationship with Trump and his consolidation as media emperor
However close Ellison’s relations with the State of Israel and its army may be (he has also been a major donor to the US organization Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which channels millions of dollars to the soldiers of that country) it would have been very difficult for his company to win the approval of the Trump administration if its owner were not close to the president of the United States himself. After many years of donating to both parties but closer to the Democrats – an admirer of Clinton, disenchanted with Obama – Ellison’s balance began to shift toward the Republican side, especially its more radical wing. In 2016, he donated a significant sum to Marco Rubio in the Republican primaries and, according to Wired, later became a “reliable donor and fundraiser for the Republican Party during the 2020 and 2024 cycles,” which allowed him to become very close to Donald Trump. Although perhaps somewhat exaggerated, one of Trump’s advisers interviewed by that website referred to the Oracle owner as “the shadow president of the United States.”
In any case, what is certain is that Netanyahu and Trump’s personal friend will not be satisfied with his latest acquisition from the Chinese. The US media has been reporting in recent weeks that the Ellisons, Larry and his son/heir David, are going for more. They now have their sights set on the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery – which includes CNN. According to the national media watchdog organization FAIR, if the sale goes through, it would “create an unprecedented level of media consolidation” in the history of global media, including powerful news channels, film production companies, cable television … to which must be added control over TikTok. The danger of hyper-concentration of media power has been pointed out by various groups. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that regulatory agencies should block the potential merger “because it is a dangerous concentration of power.” Or, as professor of digital sociology Steven Buckley points out: “It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires buy up all the cultural consumption media.” For now, regardless of whether this latest move by the Ellison clan comes to fruition, his purchase of TikTok, blessed by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, once again sets off alarm bells regarding the marriage of economic, geopolitical, and military interests; just at a time when global awareness seems to be awakening to the urgent need to stop the war machines of Israel and the United States.
Miguel Ruíz is a Mexican-Ecuadorian sociologist. He holds a PhD in Latin American Studies (UNAM). He has been a professor and researcher at various universities in Mexico and Ecuador. He currently teaches at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences and is a member of the Institute of Economic Research, both at the Central University of Ecuador.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
People take part in a protest outside a Tesla Pop-Up at Future Stores on Oxford Street in London, April 5, 2025
BRITISH sales of Tesla electric vehicles continue to plummet following its billionaire owner Elon Musk’s involvement with Donald Trump’s presidency and far-right figures in Europe.
Tesla’s new car sales dropped by nearly 60 per cent to just 987 cars in July, down from 2,462 a year ago, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).
The electric car company has slashed its monthly lease fee in Britain to boost weakening demand, offering discounts of up to 40 per cent to the country’s car leasing companies, citing a lack of storage space due to unsold Tesla vehicles in Britain.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.A parody ‘Tesla – The Swasticar’ advert posted at a London bus stop. Photograph: People vs Elon
People take part in a protest outside a Tesla Pop-Up at Future Stores on Oxford Street in London, April 5, 2025