Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet are the five largest corporations by market cap, with the value of their combined shares totaling more than $16 trillion. These firms each pull in multiple billions of dollars in profit annually, and so pay tens of billions of dollars in annual taxes, too.
But like other corporate giants in the S&P 500, the companies are also spending massive amounts on shareholder payouts, funneling trillions of dollars to wealthy shareholders through stock buybacks and shareholder dividends.
Over the past five years, those five largest companies spent more than $1 trillion on stock buybacks and dividends, according to a new analysis from Oxfam—more than five times what they paid in federal taxes over the same time period.
Looking at the entire S&P 500, the largest U.S. companies spent nearly $1.6 trillion combined on stock buybacks and dividends in 2024 alone. That’s triple the income of the poorest 27 million U.S. households combined, which totals $498 billion.
‘Unprecedented’ shareholder payouts
“There’s been an unprecedented level of shareholder payouts in recent years,” says Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic justice at Oxfam.
That includes both dividends paid out to shareholders and also stock buybacks, which is when companies buy their own stocks, thereby making their stock price go up. (Since many executives also have stock-based compensation packages, this also increases their pay.)
Oxfam’s latest analysis provides a snapshot of those payouts, and the way corporations are spending their cash.
To Oxfam, money spent on shareholder payouts are funds that could have gone to other internal investments, like raising worker wages or making a company more sustainable. The nonprofit also wants to highlight the disparity between these payments and how much companies pay in taxes.
Corporate taxes have been on the decline since the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed during President Trump’s first term. Under that law, the effective tax rates for large corporations fell from an average of 22% to an average of 12.8%, thanks to a lower overall rate and a range of tax loopholes.
If those five companies had paid pre-Tax Cuts and Jobs Act rates, Oxfam calculated that they would have paid an additional $168 billion in taxes over the past five years.
Trump’s recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act continues this trend, making permanent the TCJA tax cuts that were set to expire and bringing the effective corporate tax rate to as low as 12%, “the lowest rate in U.S. history,” per Morgan Stanley. The OBBBA also gives the biggest corporations nearly $1 trillion in new tax breaks.
A possibility for change
There’s a misconception, Riddell says, that shareholder payouts are a “rising tide” that will lift all boats in our economy.
In reality, these actions “overwhelmingly benefit the top 1% and wealthy executives,” she says. “The bottom half of the United States owns just 1% of the stock market and very little of the overall retirement pie.”
And when it comes to tax breaks, there’s an idea that when corporations save this money, they invest it elsewhere, like in workers or R&D. In reality, tax breaks fuel those enormous shareholder payouts.
“Corporate tax savings aren’t being passed on to workers or consumers,” she says. “They’re being funneled to wealthy shareholders and executives.”
Along with tax rates and stock buybacks, the Oxfam analysis also highlights the issue of enormous CEO pay: Over the past five years, the CEOs of the five largest U.S. companies made an average of $52 million annually—more than 1,000 times what a typical worker earns in a year.
These actions are fueling the growing inequality in our country, and they’re a direct result of policy, Riddell says. They’re also occurring at a time when millions of Americans will soon lose their healthcare and access to food assistance because of funding cuts.
But that means policymakers could take action to change these trends, too. That includes taxing or banning buybacks, capping dividends, supporting worker ownership, and adjusting the corporate tax code. (President Biden proposed tripling the tax that companies pay on stock buybacks, but the measure didn’t advance.)
“What this analysis shows is that the corporations can drive inequality by enriching wealthy shareholders and directly through their compensation,” Riddell says. “But also it shows that there is a possibility for change.”