Vox: Amazon’s $0 Corporate Income Tax Bill Last Year, Explained

For starters, Jeff Bezos is rich because of the value of Amazon stock, but for years, Wall Street loved the company even though it was a curiously unprofitable retail and technology giant. But more recently, Amazon has emerged recently as a consistently profitable firm, reporting nearly $11 billion in earnings last year. Yet during this surge into profitability — the company’s earnings doubled between 2017 and 2018 — Amazon’s tax bill has actually gone down. The company paid $0 in corporate income tax last year, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, an astonishing figure that generated dozens of news stories last week.

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