Business
Column: The richest Americans finished paying their Social Security taxes last week. Most of us will pay all year
Here are some rough calculations of when some of America’s richest individuals fulfilled their Social Security tax obligations for 2025: For Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, it was at about 2 p.m. on New Year’s Day. For McDonald’s CEO Christopher Kempczinski, sometime on the morning of Jan. 3. For Elon Musk, it was sometime around 12:31 a.m. New Year’s Day.
For most of the rest of us, it won’t happen until next New Year’s Eve.
The real figures on the payroll tax liabilities of the America’s plutocrat class are necessarily murky, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment. But they tell a dismal story nonetheless, as set forth annually by labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School.
A lot of income escapes the Social Security system; and the escaping income is that from the wealthiest Americans.
— Economist Teresa Ghilarducci
The story is one of rising economic inequality in United States — and more specifically how our tax system is designed to benefit the wealthy rather than ordinary workers. Anyone needing empirical evidence of these conditions need not look beyond the way we fund Social Security, our indispensable federal retirement and disability program.
Although the program is designed to provide universal coverage, the burden of paying for it falls disproportionately on the working class. Under the program’s current structure, benefits are progressive — they come to a larger percentage of lifetime earnings for lower-income retirees — but the tax is regressive, amounting to less as a percentage of income as income rises.
At least 230 of the richest Americans already have paid their Social Security tax for the year, Ghilarducci reports. That’s because wage earnings of $176,100 or more this year — the cap on wages taxed by Social Security — are exempt, and their income is so high that they reached the ceiling within days or even minutes of the New Year’s ball dropping at Times Square.
“A civil engineer earning $176,100 per year looks the same as Elon Musk in the eyes of the Social Security system,” Ghilarducci writes. By contrast, “over 164 million workers (about 94% of us) pay Social Security taxes all year long. The point is a lot of income escapes the Social Security system; and the escaping income is that from the wealthiest Americans.”
One of the most effective Social Security reforms proposed by Democrats is to raise or (preferably) eliminate the payroll tax cap. But that change doesn’t go quite far enough. What’s necessary, as Ghilarducci correctly observes, is to bring more income categories — interest, business receipts, capital gains — into the definition of earnings.
“Taxing the expanded base could more than pay for promised Social Security benefits for 35 years and there would even be some money to eliminate poverty among all Social Security recipients,” she observes.
Here’s a brief primer on the payroll tax, which typically appears on pay stubs under the label “FICA” (for “Federal Insurance Contributions Act”). For Social Security, it comes to 12.4% of gross wage income, shared equally by worker and employer, up to an annually adjusted cap. In 2025, the cap is $176,100, up from $168,600 last year. That means that you’ll pay a maximum of $10,918 directly in Social Security tax this year, with your employer paying the same sum on your behalf. (Self-employed workers have to pay both levies.)
Workers and employers each pay an additional 1.45%, with no cap, to help fund Medicare. The richest taxpayers may also be subject to a 3.8% tax on some of their investment income.
Two aspects of the payroll tax are boons for the wealthy. One is that it applies only to wages, tips, bonuses, commissions, and some fringe benefits — generally, almost anything that appears on the annual W-2 forms workers receive from their employers. “Unearned income” such as interest, dividends and capital gains distributions isn’t counted.
That’s important because unearned income tends to represent a greater share of total income for the wealthy compared with the rank-and-file.
In tax year 2022 (the most recent for which the IRS provides statistics), W-2 income accounted on average for about 75% of the total income reported by households with adjusted gross income of $50,000-$75,000. For households with income of $1 million or more, only about 25% was subject to the payroll tax. For those with income of $10 million or more (averaging about $30.4 million each), only about 12% on average was subject to the payroll tax — and then only up to the FICA cap.
To put it another way, any workers earning wages of $176,100 or less this year will pay 6.2% of their pay in Social Security tax. For someone earning $10 million, assuming all of it comes in wages, the tax rate is 0.11%.
That brings us to the complexities involved in gauging the income of America’s richest individuals, notably top corporate executives. Mostly to reduce corporate and income taxes, companies tend to keep the cash components of their executives’ pay as meager as possible, as opposed to stock and stock options. The latter aren’t subject to the payroll tax.
Apple, for example, listed Cook’s total compensation for 2023 (the most recent year reported) as $63.2 million. But only $3 million of that was in salary, plus another $10.7 million reported as a cash incentive tied to the company’s performance. An additional $2.5 million was paid for items such as security services and personal travel on private aircraft, which Apple requires Cook to use “for security and efficiency reasons.” Cook may have to pay tax on some of those items.
It’s difficult, and in some cases impossible, to figure out how much in cash a top corporate executive actually pockets in any year. The Securities and Exchange Commission implemented a regulation in 2022 mandating that public companies disclose “compensation actually paid” to top executives, ostensibly so shareholders could accurately assess how the money paid to the C-suite corresponded to a company’s performance.
In practice, however, the resulting metrics obscure almost as much as they reveal. Apple, for example, disclosed in its 2024 proxy statement that in 2023 it “actually paid” $106.6 million to Cook — but it also stated that the figure “does not represent cash or equity value realized or paid” to Cook, or to the company’s four other top executives.
Rather, the “actually paid” disclosure is merely a way to adjust the value of stock options and other equity awards given to the executives, as the value of the underlying shares rises or falls. So if you’re trying to determine how much more the bank accounts of executives swelled during the year, this is no help.
Musk’s income from Tesla, his publicly traded electric vehicle company, is especially hard to gauge. (Ghilarducci says she based her estimate of Musk’s potential tax liability on “public data on Musk’s income,” including nonwage income.)
According to Tesla’s disclosure, Musk received no salary, bonus, stock or options from 2021 through 2023. That may have something to do with the issues connected with his groundbreaking $56-billion 2018 pay package, which was challenged in a shareholder lawsuit. The pay package was overturned in January 2024 by Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, who found it excessive and not the product of an arm’s length negotiation between Musk and the Tesla board. (Tesla didn’t respond to my request for comment.)
That points to how the wealthy exploit their assets without incurring income tax, whether on ordinary or “unearned” income: They borrow against them. Tesla has disclosed that as of last March, Musk had pledged more than 238.4 million of his Tesla shares — about one-third of the total 715 million shares of which he was listed as beneficial owner — as “collateral to secure certain personal indebtedness.” The pledged stock is worth about $95 billion at the current stock price. The proceeds of loans aren’t generally treated as taxable income unless the loan is forgiven.
Tesla disclosed in its proxy statement in April that the compensation it “actually paid” Musk came to $1.4 billion in 2023. But it stated — as Apple did in relation to Cook’s pay — that the figure did “not reflect the actual amount of compensation earned by or paid to Mr. Musk” that year. It was merely an artifact of adjustments to the putative value of his stock grants as it fluctuated in relation to the value of the underlying shares.
So whether Musk paid his entire payroll tax obligation by 15 minutes into 2025 (as Ghilarducci estimated based on Musk’s total Tesla-connected wealth), or owed nothing and has paid nothing can’t be determined.
All we can say is this: The run-up of wealth among a tiny camp of mega-billionaires comes at great social cost. Conservatives and Republicans in Congress continue to claim that the cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits is an insupportable burden on America, so benefits need to be cut, though President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to preserve entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
But if the wealthy paid their fair share of the cost of those programs, they might well be solvent, even flush enough for benefits to be expanded and extended, into the limitless future.
Business
Commentary: Trump wants to let companies make fewer disclosures, thus keeping investors in the dark
Trump’s SEC is considering eliminating the mandate for quarterly corporate financial reports, but even some big investors call it a lousy idea.
This being the “information age,” it would be understandable if investors sometimes feel inundated with too much information to wade through about the stocks in their mutual fund portfolios.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, bowing like a puppy to the urgings of President Trump, is considering exactly the wrong solution to this supposed burden. It’s proposing to allow public companies to give their investors less information, as though that’s a good thing.
On May 8, the SEC proposed rescinding its mandate that public companies report financial results on a quarterly schedule. Instead, it suggests, semiannual and annual reports should suffice.
This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.
— Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets
The SEC left its proposal open for public comment for 60 days, meaning the window closed Monday. By then, the agency had received more than 68,000 comments, according to a tracker posted online by accounting professor Tzachi Zach of Ohio State.
Almost 99.9% of the comments were negative. Several organizations of institutional investors and auditing professionals, as well as a tsunami of individual investors, expressed opposition.
A similar initiative the SEC aired in 2018, during Trump’s first term, received an overwhelmingly negative response and was eventually dropped.
The tide of opposition coming from individual investors shouldn’t be surprising. “Taking away basic quarterly information means investors are blind for six months at a time,” says Dennis Kelleher, co-founder and chief executive of the investor advocacy nonprofit Better Markets.
That’s especially true for small investors, though perhaps not so much for major institutions, insiders or deep-pocketed individuals. “If you’re a big dog, you’ll get the information anyway,” Kelleher told me. “And insiders, who are trading in their own stock all the time, will have the information. This takes an already-unlevel playing field where Main Street investors are already disadvantaged, and makes it more unlevel.”
Trump set off the latest initiative with a social media post on Sept. 15, advocating the move to a six-month reporting schedule. It read, in part, “This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that, ‘China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!”
As was usual with Trump, his argument was a string of uninformed and irrelevant non sequiturs.
It’s doubtful that eliminating quarterly reports will save much, if any, money. Most 10-Qs are cookie cutter documents disclosing financial figures already embedded in corporate records.
The idea that managers would become empowered to “focus on properly running their companies” if only they were relieved of the burden of preparing a report every three months is just malarkey: Any CEOs who feel the impulse to drop everything and involve themselves in what is essentially an automated process can’t be very good at their jobs.
As for China’s “50 to 100 year view on management of a company,” what would that even mean, even if it were true? China doesn’t operate on a 50 to 100 year corporate horizon, but rather on a string of five-year plans. The most recent of these was adopted by the government in March, covers the period up to 2030, and is its 15th in a row.
Despite the flaws in Trump’s arguments, Trump’s SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, a former corporate lawyer and securities industry consultant, fell into line. Within a few days of Trump’s post, he showed up on CNBC to minimize the potential effect of the change. Private companies rely on semiannual reports, after all, he noted, although the idea of taking private companies as models for publicly traded corporations might not strike experienced investors as the wisest thing.
Atkins cited an enduring chestnut, for which there’s no evidence, that quarterly reporting is responsible for “short-term thinking” in corporate suites (though he admitted that his evidence was “anecdotal”). And he suggested that small investors have ample access to corporate information even without quarterly reports — why, he said, they can just tune in to CNBC!
“To propose change in what our rules are now would be a good way forward,” he said. “So I welcome the president’s putting this up for discussion.”
Something more insidious undergirds the SEC’s proposal than its immediate effect on corporate behavior. The agency rationalizes its proposal as seeking “a tradeoff between reducing regulatory burdens … and promoting efficient financial markets through timely disclosure.”
The problem here, Kelleher points out, is that “reducing regulatory burdens” isn’t part of the SEC’s mission in any way, shape or form. It’s a regulatory agency, and its mission since its founding in 1934 has been to protect investors, not to make things fluffier for stock issuers.
The history of financial disclosure in the U.S. shows a long-term trend favoring more disclosure, not less. In the 1880s, quarterly reporting by railroads and other transportation companies were common.
Early on, pressure for more frequent disclosure came not from government regulators, who barely existed before 1934, but from investors. The reporting of quarterly earnings, notes corporate finance expert Owen Lamont of Acadian Asset Management, was “a bottom-up historical phenomenon reflecting voluntary arrangements between firms and investors, not a top-down phenomenon imposed by law.”
By 1931, according to financial historians, 63% of New York Stock Exchange-listed firms were publishing their quarterly earnings. The Big Board mandated that frequency for most listed companies in 1939. The SEC mandated semiannual reports in 1955 and quarterly reports, as Atkins said, in 1970.
The evidence in favor of dropping the quarterly reports is uniformly thin. Some advocates cite a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett that was headlined “Short-Termism Is Harming the Economy.”
Couple of points about this: First, the target of Dimon and Buffett wasn’t quarterly financial reporting, but quarterly earnings guidance — that is, the practice of some top executives who project their earnings into the future. (This guidance usually comes at the same time they issue their SEC disclosures.)
It’s guidance, they wrote, that is “a major driver” of short-termism in corporate behavior. That’s because management is giving itself a target it feels obligated to meet, even if factors outside its control interfere with the quest.
Furthermore, Dimon and Buffett wrote, “Our views on quarterly earnings forecasts should not be misconstrued as opposition to quarterly and annual reporting.” They called transparency about financial and operating results “an essential aspect of U.S. public markets … so that the public, including shareholders and other stakeholders, can reliably assess real progress.”
Individual investors may be unmoved by the SEC’s proposal because — let’s be candid — how many of them read quarterly earnings reports, anyway? But that’s unimportant, Kelleher says, because other market participants are reading them. “So that information is in the marketplace, and that’s what actually enables price discovery, so stock prices roughly reflect what’s going on at a company, most of the time.”
More to the point, the quarterly reports reflect the highest-quality, detailed information, the information the SEC requires executives to disclose on pain of facing a civil lawsuit from the agency or even criminal liability for faking data. “Main Street investors, whether they read quarterly reports or not, are the real beneficiaries,” Kelleher says.
That’s so. The bottom line is that quarterly financial reporting helps investors. It doesn’t promote short-term behavior and its costs, modest as they are, don’t outweigh its benefits.
Over the decades, scandal-ridden corporations have hidden fraudulent behavior in the interstices between mandated disclosures—think Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, among others. Why give any corporation, even an honest one, the opportunity to disclose less?
The luxury shopping center in Pacific Palisades will reopen next month after more than $100 million in renovations forced by the January 2025 wildfire that devastated the Los Angeles neighborhood.
Palisades Village will reopen Aug. 15, owner Rick Caruso announced Wednesday. The outdoor center survived the blaze that destroyed homes and other businesses but needed refurbishment to eliminate contaminants that the fire could have spread.
Crews are putting finishing touches on mall buildings after tearing them down to the studs, treating the wood and rebuilding the walls, Caruso said.
“Everybody’s working, and stores are moving their products in,” he said. “It’s a really cool feeling that people have really locked arms and are working together.”
An electrician installs lighting for a restaurant at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Pacific Palisades resident Allison Polhill, who is rebuilding the home of 30 years that her family lost in the blaze, said she is “thrilled” at the prospect of returning to the mall she used to frequent. Its comeback is a boost for the community, she said.
“Every single step that we make to reopen our commercial corridors is going to bring more people back into the Palisades,” said Polhill, who expects to move back into her home at the end of August.
A total of 6,822 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, including more than 5,500 residences and 100 commercial businesses, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Caruso previously attributed the mall’s survival to the hard work of private firefighters and the fire-resistant materials used in the mall’s construction.
The $200-million shopping and dining center opened in 2018 with a movie theater and a roster of upmarket tenants, including Erewhon, which may be the only grocer in the heart of the fire-ravaged neighborhood when it opens.
Caruso’s company was able to fill the mall with tenants despite the long shutdown.
Palisades Village is 99% leased, with the majority of tenants returning, said Jackie Levy, chief financial and revenue officer. Nearly one-third of the shops and restaurants are new to the property.
A firefighter carries a hose back to his rig while walking through a destroyed home from the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, 2025.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, Pacific Palisades-based fashion designer Elyse Walker said she would reopen her eponymous store in Palisades Village after losing her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street to the inferno.
Other neighborhood shops destroyed in the fire that are reopening at the mall include K Bakery and Loomey’s Toys, which caters to children up to age 12 and used to be across the street from Palisades Elementary Charter School.
“It’s been a journey and I’m excited because I wasn’t sure that there was going to be a place to come back to,” said toy store owner Amanda Rastegar. “Hopefully we can bring some of that magic back.”
Rastegar’s home in the Palisades survived but was damaged by the fire. The family returned about eight weeks ago. Her last memory of the fire was a burning supermarket.
“I just couldn’t wrap my brain around what was happening,” she said. “By the time I left, Gelson’s was on fire.”
Among the returning tenants is Angelini Ristorante & Bar. Well-known Los Angeles chef Gino Angelini said he will be in the kitchen next month for a return of the Italian restaurant.
“We won’t do a big celebrity open,” he said. “We want to have a very soft opening and see our customers come back.”
Construction takes place at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
An elaborate celebration would not feel “correct for me,” Angelini said, because the devastation has been “very sad” for so many.
Other new tenants include local chef Nancy Silverton, who has agreed to move in with a new Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto. Women’s activewear retailer LESET will open its first West Coast location.
Caruso said he is optimistic that customers will return to the center, even though many Pacific Palisades residents are still dispersed. One tracking system estimated that about 30% of the Village’s customer base was impacted by the fire, he said.
“That means 70% did not get impacted, so there’s a lot of customers still left out there,” Caruso said. Historically, the center drew customers from as far away as Beverly Hills and Calabasas, as well as Malibu, Brentwood and Santa Monica.
He also hopes many will be inspired to visit the revived mall.
“I believe in the goodness of people and I believe that people are going to want to support the Palisades,” he said. “They’re going to want to be there and support the businesses that have had the courage and the heart to reopen.”
Walmart is rapidly expanding its network of electric vehicle chargers designed for customers to use while they shop.
The network could help fill gaps in EV infrastructure in states with greater need for chargers. Walmart, which has more than 5,000 locations in the U.S. and hundreds in California, says more than 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its stores.
The chargers also offer an incentive for customers to choose Walmart — Walmart Plus members will receive a 10% discount off an average price of $0.46 per kilowatt-hour of energy at the company’s chargers.
Walmart chargers are already available at more than 75 locations in 17 states, with Texas boasting the most charging stations, followed by Florida and Arizona.
Matthew Nelson, Walmart’s director of energy policy, said last week on LinkedIn that the network will soon reach 29 states, including California.
“We are delivering on the promise of affordable, reliable and convenient charging,” Nelson said in his post.
According to Walmart’s website, six charging stations are coming to California soon, though the company did not offer a specific timeline.
The chargers will be installed at stores in Antelope, Brea, Fresno, Stockton, Suisun City and Vallejo.
Most charging sites in California will include eight to 16 fast-charging stalls, said Walmart spokesperson Kelsey Bohl.
The company first announced plans in April 2023 to install its own EV chargers at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, with a goal of installing thousands of chargers by 2030. Partnering with ABB E-Mobility and Alpitronic, it added 25 new charging sites this past May and six more in June.
“Walmart is building a leading retail-integrated EV fast-charging network, focused on delivering an affordable, reliable and convenient charging experience where customers already shop,” Bohl said in an emailed statement. “Customers can charge while they shop, access stations through the Walmart app they already use, and benefit from affordable pricing.”
The charging stations already available include 612 individual charging stalls using 400-kilowatt chargers. Each stall has a dual charging cord with both Combined Charging System and North American Charging Standard connectors. The standard connectors, designed by Tesla, are smaller and lighter than the combined systems.
The primary way to pay for the chargers is through the Walmart app, but the company is also experimenting with built-in credit card readers to allow those without the app to use the stations.
Customers can check charger availability on the Walmart app. The company said the chargers will be available 24 hours a day.
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