Entrepreneur – Tesla Paid No Federal Income Taxes Over 5 Years, While Paying Top Execs $2.5 Billion, According to a New Report
Editors note: Tesla has been making lots of money, yet somehow Musk believes that LiDAR is too expensive to include, even on their luxury vehicles. Safety third!
See full original article by SHERIN SHIBU at Entrepreneur.com
Between 2018 and 2022, more than 30 companies paid its top five executives more than they paid in federal income taxes.
Key Takeaways
- A new report from The Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness highlights what major companies paid (or didn’t pay) in federal income taxes.
- Elon Musk’s Tesla was No. 1 on the list.
- Other major companies, including T-Mobile, Ford Motor, and Netflix, were on the list too.
ome of America’s biggest companies, including Tesla, T-Mobile, and Netflix, were front and center in a new report that reveals how much companies paid in federal income taxes — compared to how much they made in profit, and what they paid their top executives.
The Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness released a report Wednesday that highlighted “a significant number” of major U.S. companies, 35 in total, that paid its top five executives more than they paid in federal income taxes between 2018 and 2022.
Elon Musk’s Tesla was No. 1 on the list. The company paid its top five executives $2.5 billion over five years while bringing in $4.4 billion in U.S. profit.
Musk has a net worth of around $184 billion, with about $69.7 billion of that total based on the value of his Tesla stock, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk is one of the top three richest people in the world.
The report points out that despite Tesla’s record profits, the company “has never paid a nickel in federal income taxes.” A potential cause of this trend, according to the report, could be Tesla carrying losses forward from before it became profitable.
“These loss carryforwards smooth out the often boom-bust nature of corporate finances,” the report reads.
T-Mobile was second on the list, with a profit of $17.9 billion in the U.S. over five years and zero net federal income taxes. The top five executives there were paid $675 million from 2018-2022, according to the report, with CEO and president Mike Sievert receiving $158 million of that total.
There are a number of tax avoidance, or tax minimizing, strategies mentioned in the report, including shifting American profits to offshore tax havens or using stock option tax deductions.
The report does not take state, local, or payroll taxes into account.
See full original article by SHERIN SHIBU at Entrepreneur.com
