Jesse Eisinger
speaker
287 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 29 May
Jesse Eisinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I was born in a log cabin.
One day, I was looking at my phone, and a signal pops up, and a guy wanted to get in touch with me.
It was a tip like I get many times a week, and this one turned out to be the greatest tip I've
ever had.
Eventually, the guy leaked to us the tax information for all of the wealthiest people in America, all the household names that you could imagine.
Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Warren Buffett,
Bill Gates, et cetera, et cetera, Elon Musk.
And then we gathered a huge team at ProPublica to report on the tax returns.
And Paul Keel was my partner in this.
And we eventually over years published
over 50 stories based on these returns about the tax avoidance strategies of the wealthy.
And the big picture is, surprise, surprise, the lay understanding of our tax system is that it's extraordinarily unfair and that
people who are extremely wealthy avoid taxes in myriad ways, some of them entirely legal and very simple to do.
What we did was very powerful because we named names.
So we showed that Jeff Bezos had literally paid zero in taxes for two years when he was a billionaire, and Michael Bloomberg paid zero in taxes, and Carl Icahn paid zero.
And what we also showed is that they pay,
of just trifling sums of taxes compared to their wealth growth.
So they avoid income, and by avoiding income, they avoid taxes, and their wealth grows and grows, and then often they borrow against their wealth to fund their lifestyles.
Yes.
Yeah, he was a contractor for the IRS working for a consulting firm, Booz Allen.
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