They don't pay zero tax, for sure.

But they certainly get clever about techniques to keep it as low as possible, for shockingly low effective tax rates.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov... has a whole bunch of examples.

The only reason he paid $11B that year was because he exercised Tesla options. Many other years his tax bill has ranged from zero to millions.

What did he pay in previous years? To borrow a phrase, I’ll wait while you google it.