Since 2001, the ten most profitable corporations in the United States have made $7 trillion in after-tax profit, more than half as much as the 300 largest corporations beneath them combined. They pay the lowest rate of tax, and every reform meant to end that advantage has failed. What they keep becomes the fortunes of the people who own them, and those fortunes are now a political force.
Between 2001 and 2024, the ten most profitable corporations in the United States made $7 trillion in after-tax profit, in today’s money. The other 300 or so large corporations in our data made $13.5 trillion between them. Ten corporations made more than half as much as all the rest combined.
Cumulative after-tax profit of the ten most profitable US corporations (re-ranked each year) and the roughly 300 other large non-financial corporations in our sample, 2001 to 2024, constant 2024 US$. Source: company accounts; authors’ calculations..
Nothing like this existed in the American economy before. The gap has widened sharply since 2018. In that year, the ten largest non-financial groups in the United States took a fifth of all corporate profit. By 2024 they took almost a third. For fifteen years before that, their share had been flat or falling.
The names at the top have changed as well. Twenty years ago the most profitable groups were oil majors. Today the top of the table belongs almost entirely to Big Tech and Big Pharma. These corporations make their money from patents, software and brands. A refinery stays where it is built. A patent can be moved on paper between companies and countries, and the biggest groups move theirs wherever the tax code makes them cheapest to hold.
They also pay the least. On the tax they actually owe the US federal government, the ten biggest pay a lower rate than the next ninety, who in turn pay less than everyone else. Had the top ten paid the same rate as the rest since 2001, they would have paid $285 billion more.
That is a large sum. It is also about 4 per cent of $7 trillion. Tax does not explain why these corporations accumulate so much profit. But it does decides how much of that income they keep, and who ends up with it.
The structural tax advantage of being big and IP-intensive has outlasted every attempt to end it. In the past decade, the OECD BEPs process tackled profit shifting, Ireland closed the Double Irish, and the United States passed the 2017 Trump tax cut. As the offshore routes closed, the largest IP-intensive groups paid more tax abroad (for example, to Ireland – hence the corporate tax boom). Their rate at home fell by more. The advantage did not disappear. It simply moved from Bermuda and Ireland to Washington.
The company accounts show how. Alphabet once routed the profit on its European advertising through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. When that route closed, it brought its intellectual property back to the United States, where a deduction introduced in 2017 taxes profit earned abroad from patents held at home at a discount. By Alphabet’s own accounts, that deduction has been worth billions of dollars a year. Microsoft held the rights to sell its software in America through a subsidiary in Puerto Rico. After the 2017 reform it moved those rights home and booked a tax gain for doing so. If reform had ended the advantage, coming home would have cost money. It made money.
We call this legal-accounting power: the capacity of a corporate group to decide which of its subsidiary companies holds an asset, in which country, and at what value. It takes hundreds of subsidiaries, assets with no market price, and the best tax lawyers and accountants money can buy. Only the largest corporations have all three. Close one route and they take another. The advantage lives in the global architecture of law and accountancy, not in any single rule or regulation, which is why reform aimed at rules keeps failing.
The massive amount of cash profit these groups have accumulated does not stay inside them. Apple has spent half a trillion dollars buying back its own shares in the past six years. Buybacks raise the value of the shares that remain, and those shares are held overwhelmingly by the richest households. The top tenth of Americans own more than nine-tenths of all corporate equity.
The 100 richest Americans are now more than three times richer, in real terms, than in 2010. Their fortunes are equity stakes in the corporations at the top of the profit table: Musk in Tesla, Bezos in Amazon, Zuckerberg in Meta, Ellison in Oracle, Page and Brin in Alphabet. When those corporations keep more, their owners are worth more. Hence, concentrated corporate profit and concentrated personal wealth are the same ownership, measured twice.
We do not claim that corporate tax erosion caused this concentration. The rise at the top is a story about monopoly profit in the post-industrial knowledge economy. Our claim is about what happens next. The tax system decides how much of that profit is retained, and retained profit becomes private fortune.
The American tax system is rigged. In 1980, the tax rate was very progressive. It rose all the way up the income ladder, and at the very top more than a third of taxes paid by the richest was in the form of corporate tax. Today, the rate peaks among the rich and then falls for the super-rich (a few hundred households) in the country. Corporate tax erosion is what explains why the super-richest now pay a lower rate than the people just below them.
This is where the economics becomes politics. The American political scientist Jeffrey Winters describes oligarchy as the politics of wealth defence: extreme wealth deployed to protect itself. Fortunes on this scale pay for campaign finance, lobbying, media ownership and think tanks. Political science has documented how effectively that money is spent on undermining democracy. It has paid far less attention to how the money is made, and to the legal-accounting rules that decide how much of it the owners get to keep.
Corporate tax stops the extreme accumulation of profit before it becomes a fortune. A wealth tax arrives afterwards, when the owners already have the means to fight it. A tax code that lets the most powerful corporations pay less than their smaller rivals is not just forgoing revenue. It is subsidising their dominance, which is why we treat corporate tax as a question of antitrust. European law already does: the Apple state aid case, upheld by the Court of Justice in 2024, was decided as a distortion of competition.
Ten corporations take almost a third of US corporate profit. The people who own them have grown richer faster than anyone else in the country, and the state has cut the one tax that reached them first. This is no longer a question of inequality. It is a question of who holds power in a capitalist democracy, and whether that democracy can still tax the corporations that fund the people who run it. On the evidence of the past decade, the United States has caved to oligarchy.
This post was polished and edited using Claude (Anthropic). The research, analysis and argument are the authors’ own.
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