Jesse Eisinger
Jesse Eisinger is a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. In April 2011, he and a colleague won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression.
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Jesse Eisinger is a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. He is the author of the “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives.”
In April 2011, he and a colleague won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He was the lead reporter on the “Secret IRS Files” series that exposed the tax avoidance strategies of the ultrawealthy. The series won several prizes, including the Selden Ring in 2022. He also won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary.
He was the editor on the “Friends of the Court” series, which revealed how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel; it won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2024.
He serves on the advisory board of the University of California, Berkeley’s Financial Fraud Institute. And he was a consultant on season 3 of the HBO series “Succession.”
His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, NewYorker.com, The Washington Post, The Baffler and The American Prospect and on NPR and “This American Life.” Before joining ProPublica, he was the Wall Street editor of Conde Nast Portfolio and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering markets and finance.
He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the journalist Sarah Ellison, and their daughters.
When You’re a Billionaire, Your Hobbies Can Slash Your Tax Bill
Thoroughbred horses, auto racing, massive ranches, luxury hotels. The hobbies and side businesses of the ultrawealthy create huge write-offs that can let them get away with paying little or no income tax for as much as a decade at a time.
These Real Estate and Oil Tycoons Avoided Paying Taxes for Years
Donald Trump and other ultrarich Americans have earned billions, but they’ve also managed to repeatedly avoid paying any federal income tax by claiming huge losses on their businesses.
These Billionaires Received Taxpayer-Funded Stimulus Checks During the Pandemic
IRS records reveal that 18 billionaires and some 250 other ultrawealthy people received aid intended to help middle-class Americans.
The Billionaires Tax Isn’t New
Taxing billionaires on their wealth may sound novel, but the ideas behind it are already frequently used in the tax code.
Democratic Senators Call for Investigation of Tax Avoidance by the Ultrawealthy
Calling ProPublica’s Secret IRS Files series a “bombshell,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse demanded an investigation into how the rich use “legal tax loopholes to avoid paying their fair share of income taxes.”
The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
How We Calculated the True Tax Rates of the Wealthiest
ProPublica started with a trove of private tax data — then analyzed those records, along with sources ranging from Forbes’ list of billionaires to publicly available information from the IRS, the Federal Reserve and more.
You May Be Paying a Higher Tax Rate Than a Billionaire
A new ProPublica analysis of a trove of IRS documents revealed that the richest 25 Americans pay a tiny fraction of their wealth in taxes. But even if you use the most conventional yardstick — income — the wealthiest still pay low rates.
The Return of the Regulators
Like them or revile them, federal agencies seem poised to regain some of their traditional powers under the new administration. But it’s not clear how far President Biden wants them to go.
The Justice Department Sues Walmart, Accusing It of Illegally Dispensing Opioids
Two years after the Trump administration walked away from charging Walmart criminally for its role in the opioid crisis, the DOJ is back, making the same claims but seeking softer penalties.