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Six companies worth a combined $12.9 trillion have been accused of paying nearly $278 billion less in corporate taxes than the law expects of comparable US businesses. Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft, collectively known as the “Silicon Six,” generated $11 trillion in revenue and $2.5 trillion in profits between 2015 and 2024. A new report says these corporations have not simply found loopholes. They have built tax avoidance into how they operate.
The findings come from the Fair Tax Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit that published its latest Silicon Six analysis in April 2025. The report found the six firms paid an average corporate tax rate of 18.8%, well below the US statutory average of 29.7% for companies earning equivalent profits. Strip out one-off repatriation payments tied to past tax avoidance, and the average falls further, to just 16.1%. That gap, sustained across a decade, amounts to nearly $278 billion in avoided taxes.
For context, these companies are not small players navigating complex rules. Their combined market value exceeds the entire FTSE 100 and Euro Stoxx 50 indices put together. Their annual revenue of $1.8 trillion last year surpassed the GDP of all but 11 countries on earth. The scale of their tax shortfall, measured against what other industries pay, raises a pointed question: is this a failure of corporate ethics, or of the systems meant to hold them accountable?
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The Legal Playbook Behind Billions in Avoided Taxes
The Silicon Six have not broken the law. That, critics argue, is precisely the problem. A key mechanism the companies use is a US tax provision called the Foreign-Derived Intangible Income deduction, or FDII. It allows corporations to apply a significantly reduced tax rate, around 13%, to overseas profits connected to intellectual property held in the United States. For Meta, Alphabet, and Netflix, this deduction alone cut their effective tax rate by 5% points each in 2024.
The FDII benefit has been worth $30 billion to the Silicon Six over just the past three years, according to the Fair Tax Foundation. Beyond the FDII deduction, the companies also book profits in low-tax jurisdictions. The report singles out Amazon for what it calls “obvious profit shifting,” including routing a significant share of its UK income through Luxembourg, where corporate tax rates are substantially lower. These strategies are legal but, the FTF argues, deliberately structured to minimize what governments actually collect.
The companies’ uncertain tax positions, which represent contingency funds set aside for taxes they do not expect to ultimately pay, have more than tripled over the past decade, rising from $24.8 billion in 2015 to $82.5 billion in 2024. Critics say this inflates their stated tax contributions on paper while reducing actual payments in practice. Amazon defended its approach, saying governments write the tax laws and the company does exactly what those laws encourage. Meta and Netflix offered similar responses, saying they comply with all relevant rules in every country where they operate.
Who Pays the Least, and Who Lobbies the Most
Not all six companies behave identically, and the Fair Tax Foundation ranks them accordingly. Netflix recorded the lowest effective tax rate among the group, at 14.7%, followed by Meta at 15.4% and Apple at 18.4%. Amazon posted a rate of 19.6%, ahead of those three, but the FTF still ranked it worst overall for tax conduct, based on the sheer volume of profit shifting and the total gap between taxes owed and taxes paid. The rankings in 2025 matched those from 2019 and 2021 almost exactly, suggesting the patterns are deeply entrenched.
Beyond their tax strategies, the Silicon Six spent $115 million directly lobbying governments in the United States and European Union in 2024, according to the Fair Tax Foundation. That political reach matters, because the rules governing their tax exposure are ultimately set by the legislators they fund. The bosses of several Silicon Six companies, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, a visible sign of just how close these corporations now sit to the centers of political power.
The analysis lands as Republicans in Congress and President Trump work to advance another round of tax cuts that would predominantly benefit large corporations, while the Trump administration has simultaneously moved to cut the IRS workforce through large-scale layoffs. A weakened tax authority makes enforcement harder. The FTF also notes that in February 2025, the US withdrew from the OECD’s global minimum tax agreement, a deal that could have established a 15% floor on corporate tax rates worldwide and significantly reduced the scope for profit shifting.
A Broken System, a $278 Billion Question, and No Easy Fix
The Fair Tax Foundation is clear about what it wants: the US should end the FDII tax break, back the OECD’s 15% global minimum tax, and push for greater financial transparency from multinationals. Other countries, the report argues, should stop treating the Silicon Six’s low overseas tax contributions as an acceptable outcome of international trade and start demanding a fairer share. Australia passed public country-by-country reporting legislation in November 2024, and the EU has introduced mandatory breakdowns of revenue and taxes paid by large multinationals, signaling some momentum for reform.
The companies themselves maintain they are model corporate citizens operating within the rules. That argument has a certain logic. If a tax break exists, companies will use it. If profits can be legally booked somewhere cheaper, they will be. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that at least 15 major corporations each avoided more than $1 billion in tax through the FDII break alone since 2018, with Alphabet reporting the most at over $11 billion. The Silicon Six are not outliers. They are the most visible example of a much wider pattern.
What makes the $278 billion figure significant is not just the size, but the duration. This is not a one-year anomaly or the result of a single aggressive move. It is a decade-long outcome, consistently reproduced across six of the most profitable companies in human history, through administrations of both parties, across multiple rounds of tax reform. The real question is not whether these companies are breaking rules. It is whether the rules, as written, were ever designed to make them pay.