Billionaires’ Tax Filings Agree With AOC. They Don’t “Earn” Their Billions.
Elon Musk would need to work 58 times longer than the age of the universe to “earn” his wealth.
An activist holds a sign during a “Rally to Say No to Tax Breaks for Billionaires and Corporations” at the Upper Senate Park on Capitol Hill on April 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Alex Cobham
May 29, 2026
Elon Musk would need to work 58 times longer than the age of the universe to “earn” his wealth.
An activist holds a sign during a “Rally to Say No to Tax Breaks for Billionaires and Corporations” at the Upper Senate Park on Capitol Hill on April 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Alex Cobham
May 29, 2026
Common Dreams
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) kicked off a storm when she said in a podcast interview last week that a person cannot “earn” a billion dollars.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded by saying that the statement was “bizarrely foolish” and then pointed to the worst possible example he could think of to counter Ocasio-Cortez’s point: mega-billionaire Elon Musk.
In the eyes of the US government, and specifically the IRS, there’s no question about it. Elon Musk did not “earn” his wealth. Otherwise, he’d be paying a tax rate at least 17 times greater than he is—and generating a tax bill bigger than the GDP of Nevada.
Unless you’re immortal, Ocasio-Cortez is indeed correct that it’s impossible to earn a billion dollars.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
But what if you are Elon Musk? How long would it you take then? A billion years to earn a billion dollars, and 800 billion years to earn $800 billion—so, 58 times longer than the existence of the known universe.
Now that’s bizarre.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
Elon Musk—like Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Elison and many of the world’s other richest men—only “earns” $1 a year. He is what’s known as a $1 CEO because he gets paid an annual salary of $1.
What most people don’t realize when we talk about wealth and wealth taxes is that we’re talking about two types of wealth. There’s earned wealth, which is when you get paid for you what you do (eg salaries, wages, etc). And then there’s collected wealth, which is when you get paid for what you own—eg dividends for owning stocks or rent money for owning real estate.
Most people primarily rely on earned wealth for a living. Billionaires on the other hand, their wealth is almost entirely collected wealth.
And that matters, because collected wealth tends to grow a lot faster than earned wealth, but more importantly, because governments tend to tax collected wealth a lot less than earned wealth.
In fact, billionaires very often deliberately reshuffle their wealth around into collected types of wealth specifically to underreport what they “earn” to the IRS and pay less income tax. It’s why Elon Musk can be the world’s richest man on an annual salary of $1. It’s why he and Jeff Bezos have been able to pay zero income taxes in some years while topping the Forbes richest people’s list. It’s also why Bezos was able to receive a family tax credit for families earning less than $100,000 a year.
But it gets even more bizarre.
Many billionaires aren’t just not earning much, they’re hopelessly in debt—apparently. Many of them are actually living off huge loans that they don’t expect to pay off in their lifetimes. It’s a scheme called “Buy, Borrow, Die.”
Taking their tax allergies to the extreme, rather than selling assets to get the money they need to actually pay for things, some billionaires take out loans against their assets instead. This way, they don’t have to pay the taxes that would have applied if they sold their assets, plus they get to hold on to the assets which can become worth even more over time. And because the money they get this way is technically loan money, it doesn’t count as earned income—and so they can continue to underreport their “earnings” to the IRS and underpay tax.
It might come as a shock to Sen Cruz, but many US billionaires, like his example Elon Musk, have done all they can to “earn” as little to none of their wealth, and some have even gone so far as to “indebt” their billions instead.
But why should we care about any of this?
Because it’s this two-tier tax system that gives special treatment to collected wealth over earned wealth that has allowed the extreme wealth of super-rich individuals to quadruple since the 1980s.
The rise of extreme wealth is directly linked to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt, and to people living shorter lives. A G20 report co-authored by winner of the Nobel prize for economics Joseph Stiglitz warns that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.
What makes wealth taxes so powerful—and so opposed by a vocal minority among the superrich—isn’t just the huge sums of public funds they can bring in. It’s that by specifically taxing collected wealth, wealth taxes directly challenge this two-tier tax system. It’s about protecting economies, people and planet from the harms of extreme wealth.
Whether you’re a wealth earner or a wealth collector, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Alex Cobham
Alex Cobham is CEO of the Tax Justice Network, which publishes research on tax abuse trusted by governments, tax administrations and law enforcement agencies around the world. An economist and published author, Alex has worked at Oxford University, Christian Aid, Save the Children, and the Center for Global Development, and consulted widely, including for UNCTAD, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, DFID, and the World Bank.
Full Bio >
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) kicked off a storm when she said in a podcast interview last week that a person cannot “earn” a billion dollars.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded by saying that the statement was “bizarrely foolish” and then pointed to the worst possible example he could think of to counter Ocasio-Cortez’s point: mega-billionaire Elon Musk.
In the eyes of the US government, and specifically the IRS, there’s no question about it. Elon Musk did not “earn” his wealth. Otherwise, he’d be paying a tax rate at least 17 times greater than he is—and generating a tax bill bigger than the GDP of Nevada.
Unless you’re immortal, Ocasio-Cortez is indeed correct that it’s impossible to earn a billion dollars.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
But what if you are Elon Musk? How long would it you take then? A billion years to earn a billion dollars, and 800 billion years to earn $800 billion—so, 58 times longer than the existence of the known universe.
Now that’s bizarre.
The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.
Elon Musk—like Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Elison and many of the world’s other richest men—only “earns” $1 a year. He is what’s known as a $1 CEO because he gets paid an annual salary of $1.
What most people don’t realize when we talk about wealth and wealth taxes is that we’re talking about two types of wealth. There’s earned wealth, which is when you get paid for you what you do (eg salaries, wages, etc). And then there’s collected wealth, which is when you get paid for what you own—eg dividends for owning stocks or rent money for owning real estate.
Most people primarily rely on earned wealth for a living. Billionaires on the other hand, their wealth is almost entirely collected wealth.
And that matters, because collected wealth tends to grow a lot faster than earned wealth, but more importantly, because governments tend to tax collected wealth a lot less than earned wealth.
In fact, billionaires very often deliberately reshuffle their wealth around into collected types of wealth specifically to underreport what they “earn” to the IRS and pay less income tax. It’s why Elon Musk can be the world’s richest man on an annual salary of $1. It’s why he and Jeff Bezos have been able to pay zero income taxes in some years while topping the Forbes richest people’s list. It’s also why Bezos was able to receive a family tax credit for families earning less than $100,000 a year.
But it gets even more bizarre.
Many billionaires aren’t just not earning much, they’re hopelessly in debt—apparently. Many of them are actually living off huge loans that they don’t expect to pay off in their lifetimes. It’s a scheme called “Buy, Borrow, Die.”
Taking their tax allergies to the extreme, rather than selling assets to get the money they need to actually pay for things, some billionaires take out loans against their assets instead. This way, they don’t have to pay the taxes that would have applied if they sold their assets, plus they get to hold on to the assets which can become worth even more over time. And because the money they get this way is technically loan money, it doesn’t count as earned income—and so they can continue to underreport their “earnings” to the IRS and underpay tax.
It might come as a shock to Sen Cruz, but many US billionaires, like his example Elon Musk, have done all they can to “earn” as little to none of their wealth, and some have even gone so far as to “indebt” their billions instead.
But why should we care about any of this?
Because it’s this two-tier tax system that gives special treatment to collected wealth over earned wealth that has allowed the extreme wealth of super-rich individuals to quadruple since the 1980s.
The rise of extreme wealth is directly linked to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt, and to people living shorter lives. A G20 report co-authored by winner of the Nobel prize for economics Joseph Stiglitz warns that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.
What makes wealth taxes so powerful—and so opposed by a vocal minority among the superrich—isn’t just the huge sums of public funds they can bring in. It’s that by specifically taxing collected wealth, wealth taxes directly challenge this two-tier tax system. It’s about protecting economies, people and planet from the harms of extreme wealth.
Whether you’re a wealth earner or a wealth collector, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Alex Cobham
Alex Cobham is CEO of the Tax Justice Network, which publishes research on tax abuse trusted by governments, tax administrations and law enforcement agencies around the world. An economist and published author, Alex has worked at Oxford University, Christian Aid, Save the Children, and the Center for Global Development, and consulted widely, including for UNCTAD, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia, DFID, and the World Bank.
Full Bio >
Trump Lets Big Corporations Dodge $40 Billion in Taxes as He Jacks Up Costs for Working Class
“While working Americans struggle to put food on the table, Trump has found another way to cut costs for the ultra-wealthy,” said one House Democrat. “Same story, different day.”
US President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, was pictured signing the GOP reconciliation package into law on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Jake Johnson
May 29, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
President Donald Trump’s decision last year to withdraw the US from a global effort to rein in corporate tax-dodging has allowed major American companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes, a significant win for profitable business at a time when working class families are struggling with higher costs and stagnant pay.
The New York Times, citing securities filings, reported Friday that American Express, Paypal, Pepsi, and other major US-based corporations “avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands.”
The Times noted that the companies often “funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices, or customers.”
“Some companies using tax havens to avoid US income tax rely on federal funding for their profits,” the newspaper reported. “Thermo Fisher Scientific, the scientific equipment maker, cut its taxes by $3.5 billion last year via Malta. Honeywell, which received over $30 billion in Defense Department contracts over the past decade, used Swiss units to cut its tax rate by more than a quarter—or $301 million—last year.”
The tax avoidance was enabled by Trump’s decision, on his first day back in the White House, to end US participation in long-running international negotiations to enact a minimum corporate tax and other measures to stop companies from avoiding taxes by offshoring their profits. The Trump administration’s top international tax official, Rebecca Burch, formerly worked for Ernst & Young, which has lobbied on behalf of American Express and other companies benefiting from White House tax policy.
“While working Americans struggle to put food on the table, Trump has found another way to cut costs for the ultra-wealthy,” US Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) wrote in response to the Times reporting. “Same story, different day.”
Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have delivered big for corporate America since taking power after the 2024 elections, doubling down on tax cuts first passed in 2017 and quietly pursuing regulatory changes that will deliver windfalls to major companies.
A recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that at least 88 of the largest corporations in the US paid nothing in federal income tax in fiscal year 2025, “at least in part due to two separate packages of corporate tax cuts pushed through by the Trump administration: last year’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).”
The Times noted Friday that the TCJA enacted “a few new levies, including one on profits that companies moved into tax havens.”
“But the provision contained an escape hatch: it permitted companies to blend the profits and taxes reported in places like Germany, France, or Japan with earnings reported in tax havens like Grand Cayman,” the Times explained. “That, in turn, helps many companies avoid the new offshore tax.”
The Trump administration also cut a deal earlier this this year with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that makes it easier for US-headquartered companies to relocate profits in more favorable countries, exempting them from Biden-era efforts to stop such behavior.
The US Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest corporate lobbying organization, celebrated the agreement.
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