WASHINGTON—Amazon, already infamous for its low pay and anti-union law-breaking, leads the nation’s low-wage companies in the net wealth of its ruler and founder, Jeff Bezos, and in the number of lobbyists it sent to cajole Congress into passing the monster Trump-GOP 2025 tax cut for corporations and the 1%, a new report says.
As a matter of fact, the Institute for Policy Studies report reveals Bezos took home $1.9 million in compensation last year, but his net worth, virtually all of it in Amazon stock, soared to $254 billion.
To put that in perspective, the next two executives among the 100 big lowest-paying firms whom the Executive Excess 2026 report covers are Robert and James Walton, part of the clan that owns Walmart. They had a net worth last year of $257 billion combined. And all the executives listed in the study combined for a net worth of just under a trillion dollars.
Meanwhile, the median wage for an Amazon worker last year was $40,206 and the median—the point where half the workforce is above, including CEOs, and half below—at Walmart was $30,520.
Amazon and Walmart stood out for the contrasts between high pay and high wealth of their bosses and low pay for their workers among the 100 firms that IPS studied. The 100 are those within the Standard and Poor’s 500—the biggest and the richest—with such characteristics.
When the corporate honchos at the low-wage firms aren’t awarding themselves big dollars through hefty compensation packages and stock buybacks, they’re stiffing their workers, whose median wages have lagged behind the nation’s inflation rate starting in 2019 through last year, IPS adds.
Inflation increased by 25.9% in those years, nominal worker pay—not adjusted for inflation—rose by 20.7%, and nominal CEO compensation increased by 41.4%.
And the companies lobbied for the Trump-GOP “Big Beautiful Bill” loaded with tax breaks for corporations and the 1%, partially paid for by throwing millions of people off Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps through budget cuts, while keeping silent about Trump’s troops and their vicious and violent attacks on workers, most of them Spanish-speaking.
“The Low-Wage 100 have chosen to wield their considerable political power over the past year,” wrote Sarah Anderson, IPS’s Director of Global Economy research, head of IPS’s team.
“Our main finding: They have overwhelmingly focused on tax cuts and other policies that primarily benefit CEOs and other wealthy individuals while turning a blind eye to government actions that threaten the economic and personal security of low-wage workers.”
Instead, when lawmakers passed the measure, and Trump signed it last July 4, the low-paying 199 big firms lauded it—but through their lobbying front groups, such as the National Retail Federation, which is widely considered to be run by Walmart.
“Not one” of the 100 lowest-paying big firms “expressed concern about the law’s Medicaid and SNAP cuts. Only the National Retail Federation even mentioned the cuts–and only did so to praise them for “reducing waste and fraud…We could find no evidence of any Low-Wage 100 executives raising concerns about these painful safety net cuts.
“All the statements applaud the law’s tax cuts, which will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.”
Amazon led the league in lobbyists on its payroll, 127, in 2025, the report says. And that doesn’t count the lobbyists for trade associations which Amazon helps run. While the report does not say so, OpenSecrets.org reveals that Amazon spent $19.07 million on lobbying lawmakers last year.
But this year, the monster warehouse, retailer and behemoth Internet seller may smash its all-time high for lobbying spending, set in 2022. It spent $9.6 million on lobbying in the first three months of 2026.
Meanwhile, Amazon workers at its JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, N.Y., who voted four years ago to unionize with the then-independent Amazon Labor Union, have yet to reach a first contract. And Bezos is using spare cash to fund a federal lawsuit by it and other mega-firms to declare the National Labor Relations Act, the nation’s basic labor law, unconstitutional.
Walmart, whose two executives finished second and third to Bezos in net wealth, specialized in using its profits for stock buybacks, which line the pockets of its executives, owners and Wall Street.
“The giant retailer spent $8.1 billion on share repurchases,” leading all the firms in the survey in that category, the report says. That money “could have funded a $3,851 bonus for each of the firm’s 2.1 million employees in 2025.
“Doug McMillon, who stepped down as Walmart CEO on Jan. 31, 2026, raked in $29.2 million in 2025, 958 times as much as Walmart’s median pay of $30,520. McMillon’s retirement benefits include deferred compensation valued at $169 million.”
Instead, Walmart finished a distant second to Amazon in the number of its lobbyists—75—not counting front groups such as the National Retail Federation, the report says. Open Secrets did not have Walmart lobbying spending for 2025, but its 2024 spending was $7.24 million, double the $3.8 million the firm and its executives shoveled at politicians that year.
Anderson had to put the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, to one side. His $1 trillion compensation package would have skewed the report, and his firms, including Tesla and SpaceX, are not among the 100 lowest-payers listed in the Institute for Policy Studies report.
How much is Musk getting? His $1 trillion is more than the net worth of all the 36 billionaires in the low-paying 100 firms—Bezos and the Waltons included—combined: $946 billion.
Besides Amazon and Walmart, other retailers such as Dollar General, Home Depot and Target, fast-food firms such as Starbucks and Yum, the “gig” company DoorDash—which helped repeal a California minimum wage and “employee” classification for its drivers—and executives from Tyson Foods and Estee Lauder cosmetics stood out on the low-pay list.
So did Miriam Adelson, owner of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, who was sixth on the net worth list, at $33.6 billion. She’s not only a GOP contributor, but also a big backer of the now-toxic American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a strong backer of the hard-right Israeli government’s policies and its murderous war on Gaza and Iran.
The Institute for Policy Studies again offered proposals to reduce such yawning gaps, as its report criticized the excesses of the capitalist system and its ability to co-opt or buy off politicians to do its bidding.
Its leading recommendation includes several proposals for extra excise or income taxes on excessive executive pay and compensation, generally described as any pay package where the ratio between the honcho’s pay and the median pay of the workers is 50-1 or larger.
The higher taxes, already in effect in San Francisco and Portland, Ore., are both revenue raisers and publicly extremely popular. Californians will vote in November on a one-time, one-year higher tax on the highest-compensated CEOs.
IPS also proposes tying government contracts to the ratio between CEO pay and worker pay, with firms with low ratios getting preference for government work. And it advocates taxing and restricting stock buybacks, which are now a prime form of compensation for many of the CEOs. Stock buybacks were not even legal until the Reagan administration.
The entire report is on the IPS website.
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