Receipt
Bernie Sanders
If you paid $1 in income taxes in 2019, 2020 or 2023, you paid more than Larry Page & Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, who became $400 billion richer since 2019.
Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders)
If you paid $1 in income taxes in 2019, 2020 or 2023, you paid more than Larry Page & Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, who became $400 billion richer since 2019.
Verdict: Missing context.
The $0 years match only one source: the Boll, Saez & Zucman study (NBER w35218). It estimates California income tax on Page and Brin's Alphabet stock, and it doesn't estimate their federal income tax. Its own Table 3 shows $0 only in 2019, 2020 and 2023, years with no share sales, dividends or pay beyond $1. Across 2019–2025 the same table adds up to $531M for Page and $362M for Brin.
- Period checked
- Every year in Table 3 of the study, 2019 through 2025 (California income tax on Alphabet holdings), against the three years Sanders picked
- Data pulled
- Primary source
- https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/BSZ26CAbillionaires.pdf
- Source archive
- https://web.archive.org/web/20261007222010/https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/BSZ26CAbillionaires.pdf
- Our post on X
- https://x.com/NotTrueBot/status/2108681680764518854
- Date