Burn The Playbook
88 Companies. Billions in Profit. $0 in Tax.
Tesla made $5.7 billion and paid nothing. The statutory rate is 21%. The effective rate is a joke. And the loopholes are bipartisan.
WASHINGTON — In 2025, 88 profitable U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax despite reporting billions in combined U.S. profits. The list includes Tesla, Disney, T-Mobile, CVS, and Nike.
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Tesla alone reported $5.7 billion in U.S. income in 2025 and paid nothing. Zero. The statutory corporate tax rate is 21%. Tesla's effective rate: 0%. The company's CEO had direct influence over government spending through DOGE while his company contributed nothing to the treasury.
Six companies alone reaped $83 billion in cumulative federal tax breaks in 2025. The tools: accelerated depreciation, stock-based compensation deductions, energy credits, and offshore profit shifting. The carried interest loophole — which taxes fund managers' income at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income rates — has survived every tax reform attempt since 2007 despite bipartisan rhetorical opposition.
Read the ITEP report yourself, the one that named all 88 companies by name.
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The Receipts
1. 88 companies, $0 tax: 88 profitable corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2025 despite billions in combined profits. Includes Tesla, Disney, T-Mobile, CVS, Nike. Source: ITEP, April 2026.
2. Tesla: $5.7B, $0 tax: Tesla reported $5.7 billion in U.S. income and paid zero federal income tax, using stock option deductions and energy credits. Its CEO ran DOGE. Source: ITEP.
3. $83 billion in breaks: Six companies reaped $83 billion in cumulative federal tax breaks in 2025. The carried interest loophole survives every reform attempt since 2007, costing ~$13 billion per decade. Source: ITEP, Yale Budget Lab, DLA Piper.
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The Dispatch
The corporate tax rate is 21%. The corporate tax rate is also 0%. Both are true. Only one applies to you.
A worker earning $57,000 pays an effective federal tax rate of roughly 12-15%. Tesla earned $5.7 billion and paid zero. The worker funded the roads Tesla's trucks drive on, the courts Tesla's lawyers use, and the military that protects Tesla's global supply chain. Tesla funded nothing.
The carried interest loophole has been denounced by politicians in both parties for nearly two decades. It survives because the people who benefit from it fund the campaigns of the people who could close it. That is not a loophole. That is a business model.
— Michael Starr Hopkins · Washington, D.C.
Burn Notice
You paid your taxes this year. Tesla did not. Disney did not. CVS did not. Nike did not.
The statutory rate is 21%. The effective rate for 88 of the most profitable companies in America is zero. The difference between those two numbers is not a technicality. It is the cost of the lobbyist.
A tax code that lets billionaires pay nothing while workers fund the government is not a code. It is a caste system with a filing deadline.
The tax code has two rates: 21% for the brochure and 0% for the companies that wrote it.
— MSH
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