The Apple NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score
13.3
/ 100
apple.com
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Apple’s NOligarchy Score is 13.26 out of 100 — meaning this is one of the most aggressive concentrators of corporate power tracked across the entire dataset. The closer a score falls to zero, the more a company has chosen to spend on political influence, executive enrichment, and shareholder payouts while racking up regulatory penalties. Apple is nearly at the floor.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
24.5
Wealth Extraction
0.0
Playing by the Rules
11.2
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
The Pillar Grades:
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Political Access Grade: 24.5/100. Apple poured $20.29 million into federal lobbying from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (the two-year tracking period), deploying 38 lobbyists across 15 distinct issue areas. No corporate Political Action Committee (PAC) spending is recorded, but the direct lobbying machine is substantial.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 0.0/100. A perfect zero. Apple spent more than $185 billion buying back its own stock in just the two most recent fiscal years alone, while its chief executive’s three-year average compensation package ran 918 times the median worker’s salary. Nothing in the data record comes close to justifying a higher grade.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 11.16/100. Seven regulatory cases and $175.4 million in fines over the covered years — and Apple holds the single worst penalty record among all 12 companies tracked in the Computer & Electronic Product Manufacturing sector.
The Sector Context: Apple ranks 12th out of 12 companies in the Computer & Electronic Product Manufacturing sector, where the average NOligarchy score is 61.4. Apple doesn’t trail the industry standard by a few points — it scores less than a quarter of its sector peers’ average, sitting dead last. For higher-scoring places to shop in this sector, see the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: $185 Billion Spent Enriching Shareholders While Workers Got Nothing Extra and Regulators Got Ignored
Apple generated $416.2 billion in annual revenue — more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many mid-sized countries — yet the single sharpest choice this company made was to funnel over $185 billion in just two fiscal years into a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses, while its median worker earned $139,483 and its chief executive collected a three-year average package of roughly $128 million. At the same time, regulators and courts handed Apple $175.4 million in penalties across seven cases, and state and local governments handed Apple more than $163 million in public subsidies — meaning taxpayers were simultaneously subsidizing the company and penalizing it. The gap between what Apple chose to return to its wealthiest shareholders and what it chose to leave for everyone else is not a rounding error; it is the central story of how this company operates.
Spending $20 Million to Shape the Rules That Govern Its Own Empire
Apple is not a passive bystander in Washington. From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, the company channeled $20.29 million into federal lobbying — an average of more than $2.5 million per quarter — knocking on doors at the House of Representatives (140 contacts), the Senate (135 contacts), the Executive Office of the President (47 contacts), and more than a dozen other agencies and offices. No corporate PAC contributions are recorded for this period, though Apple executives made $130,061 in individual political contributions tracked through the Federal Election Commission (FEC), meaning the company’s influence strategy runs primarily through direct lobbying rather than coordinated candidate funding.
FEDERAL CONTACT LOG
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
140
≈ every 4th business day
SENATE
135
≈ every 4th business day
Executive Office of the President (EOP)
47
≈ every 11th business day
Treasury, Dept of
16
≈ every 31st business day
Commerce, Dept of (DOC)
13
≈ every 38th business day
20 federal bodies named in federal lobbying filings · 2024-Q3–2026-Q2
Between 2024-Q3 and 2026-Q2, Apple was named in lobbying filings reaching 20 federal bodies — from HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to SENATE.
The 15 issue areas Apple’s lobbyists covered read like a map of every regulatory threat the company faces. Trade was the most-filed topic (19 filings), covering tariff barriers, semiconductor supply chains, and the European Union’s Digital Markets Act — all directly relevant to a company that manufactures abroad, sells globally, and faces growing foreign regulatory pressure on its platform practices. Taxation, Copyright/Patent/Trademark, and Telecommunications each drew 16 filings, reflecting Apple’s ongoing effort to manage its global tax posture, protect its intellectual property portfolio from litigation and legislative reform, and defend its spectrum and accessibility interests. The Computer Industry category (8 filings) is where the App Store battles take center stage.
Four bills dominated the App Store lobbying push. Lobbyists cited the Open App Markets Act (S. 2153) six times — legislation currently before the Senate Judiciary Committee that would require large app stores to allow third-party payment systems and competing app marketplaces. They cited the App Store Accountability Act (H.R. 3149) six times — a bill advanced by subcommittee that would impose new rules on app marketplace operators. The App Store Freedom Act (H.R. 3209) appeared five times across filings covering trade, taxation, intellectual property, telecommunications, and labor issues. Each of these bills, if enacted, would constrain Apple’s ability to require developers to use its own payment infrastructure — the same infrastructure that generates billions in annual commission revenue. Apple’s filings record that its lobbyists referenced these bills; they do not state the company’s position on them.
Child safety legislation drew serious attention as well. The Kids Online Safety Act (S. 1748) was cited six times across computer industry and consumer safety filings, as was the App Store Accountability Act Senate companion bill (S. 1586). The Parents Over Platforms Act (H.R. 6333) also appeared. These are bills Apple’s lobbyists engaged with in the same filings where the company described “providing information relevant to online child safety” — a framing that places Apple in the conversation without disclosing what it said.
On patents, filings named the PREVAIL Act (S. 1553 / H.R. 3160) and the RESTORE Patent Rights Act of 2025 (S. 708 / H.R. 1574) in manufacturing and labor filings covering “general patent policy, including issues related to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.” The health wearables space generated its own bill reference: the WEAR IT Act (H.R. 4203), cited three times in health filings describing Apple’s consumer wearable devices and health product features.
Apple retained two outside lobbying firms during this period. Both carry notable cross-client portfolios: Fierce Government Relations also lobbies for The Home Depot Inc, and FGS Global (US) LLC also lobbies for Lenovo Group Limited — a direct Apple hardware competitor. One former government official turned lobbyist appears in Apple’s filings, a veteran of the Senate Finance Committee and the offices of multiple senior senators, with a résumé covering tax, trade, and economic policy — precisely the issue areas Apple files most heavily on.
Shared Lobbying Exposure
Apple
client
FGS GLOBAL (US) LLC (FKA FGH HOLDINGS LLC)
lobbying firm
Lenovo Group Limited
also a client
The Walt Disney Company
also a client
FIERCE GOVERNMENT RELATIONS also lobbies for Atlas Holdings, The Home Depot Inc
Why it matters: the same firm argues Apple’s case and its rivals’ — one hire buys a web of shared access that can’t be seen from outside. This network worsens Apple’s political-access score (see methodology for the exact factor).
$185 Billion Back to Shareholders, $139,000 a Year for the Worker Who Built the Phone
The numbers here are not complicated. They are just very large, and very one-sided.
The CEO Pay Gap: Apple’s CEO pay ratio is 918:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, per the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $128 million. The median Apple employee earned $139,483 in the most recent reported year. To put that in terms a frontline employee would recognize: the chief executive collected the equivalent of nearly 918 full-time median worker salaries — every single year, on average. A retail associate or supply chain technician would need to work for nearly a millennium to earn what the CEO was paid in three years.
The Shareholder Payout: Apple spent $90.7 billion on buybacks in fiscal year 2025 and $94.9 billion in fiscal year 2024 — a combined $185.7 billion in two years, each year representing roughly 21–24% of Apple’s total annual revenue. That is not an investment in factories, workers, or research. It is a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — cash handed directly to shareholders, who are disproportionately the wealthiest 10% of Americans, the group that owns 93% of the stock market.
The Missed Raise: Apple’s proxy filing does not disclose total global headcount, which means a precise per-worker raise calculation cannot be computed from the public record. The scale of the payout is not ambiguous.
The Dividend Factor: Apple did not abandon traditional investor payouts in favor of buybacks — it ran both programs simultaneously at enormous scale. The company paid $15.4 billion in dividends in fiscal 2025 and $15.2 billion in fiscal 2024. That means Apple paid out more than $30 billion in standard dividends on top of $185 billion in buybacks — over $215 billion in combined shareholder returns across just two fiscal years. The data shows Apple was not forced to choose between rewarding investors and investing in its people. It chose to do both at maximum scale and kept workers’ base earnings exactly where they were.
Executive Bonuses: When Apple buys back shares, it reduces the total number of shares in circulation. Fewer shares means each remaining share represents a larger slice of the company’s earnings — Earnings Per Share (EPS) rises even if total profits stay flat. EPS is a standard trigger in executive compensation formulas. The CEO whose three-year average pay ran to roughly $128 million approved the buyback program. The buyback program helped generate the metrics that justified the $128 million package. This is the mechanism, stated plainly.
Tax Avoidance: Apple paid an effective tax rate of 15.6% — 5.4 percentage points below the 21% federal statutory rate that Congress set, and 1.85 percentage points below the 17.45% median paid by other companies in the Computer & Electronic Product Manufacturing sector. The biggest single factor pulling Apple’s rate down is visible in its rate reconciliation: earnings of foreign subsidiaries reduced the effective rate by 6.1 percentage points, worth approximately $8.12 billion in taxes not paid. The rate reconciliation also includes an Ireland-linked tax opinion and profit allocation ruling, as well as a foreign tax credit carryforward also connected to Ireland — jurisdictions the 10-K filing identifies in connection with Apple’s offshore income treatment.
Apple’s 10-K discloses that the European Court of Justice confirmed in September 2024 the European Commission’s 2016 State Aid decision, finding that Ireland had granted state aid to Apple through tax opinions issued in 1991 and 2007 concerning profit allocation to Irish branches of two Apple subsidiaries. This resulted in a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion in fiscal 2024. Research and development credits provided an additional rate reduction of 0.8 percentage points in fiscal 2025, partially offset by a 1.6 percentage point increase from a change in valuation allowance.
Apple chose to pay 5.4 percentage points less than the rate Congress set and 1.85 points less than its own sector peers. That gap is not an accounting accident — it is a structural decision that shifts real tax burden off Apple’s balance sheet and onto everyone else. Apple also holds $23.2 billion in gross unrecognized tax benefits as of September 2025 — contested deductions it has claimed on its taxes that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has not yet agreed are valid. On top of that, unrecognized tax benefits equal 8% of Apple’s pre-tax income, a further measure of the tax positions still under dispute.
Statutory federal rate
21%
Sector median
17.4%
This company
15.6%
Apple's effective federal tax rate was 15.6% against the 21% statutory rate, and below the 17.4% sector median — 5.4 percentage points drained away.
Seven Cases, $175 Million in Fines, and the Worst Record in the Sector
Apple’s compliance record over the two-year tracking period is the worst among all 12 companies tracked in the Computer & Electronic Product Manufacturing sector. Seven separate regulatory cases generated a combined $175.4 million in penalties between 2024 and 2026. These are not isolated stumbles — they span privacy violations, consumer protection failures, product safety problems, hazardous waste mishandling, and workplace safety infractions.
The Pattern: Privacy violations generated the single largest category — $95 million from one federal civil lawsuit in 2025. Consumer protection violations added $60.15 million across three separate cases. Collectively, the seven cases across the two-year tracking period cover five distinct offense categories, suggesting that Apple’s legal exposure is not concentrated in one corner of the business but distributed across its product, data, and operational practices.
The Big Case: The largest single penalty was a $95 million settlement in a federal privacy lawsuit in 2025. The second-largest was a $35 million consumer protection settlement from a federal civil lawsuit in 2024. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) separately imposed a $25 million consumer protection penalty in 2024. A $20 million product safety settlement followed in 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessed a $261,283 hazardous waste penalty in 2025. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited Apple for a workplace safety violation totaling $31,870 in 2025. And in 2026, a state attorney general’s office secured a $150,000 consumer protection settlement.
To calibrate the scale: Apple’s total regulatory fines across the entire two-year period represent a tiny fraction of even a single year’s buyback spend — less than a rounding error on the shareholder payout line.
The Subsidy Flip: While regulators were penalizing Apple for breaking the rules, governments were simultaneously handing it $163 million in public money. Between 2024 and 2025, Apple collected 15 separate grants and credits. The three largest single awards totaled $36.7 million, $30.2 million, and $18.5 million respectively. Taxpayers across multiple states wrote checks to a company that reported $416 billion in annual revenue and chose to spend $185 billion enriching its shareholders.
EXHIBIT — ONE TEACHER-YEAR AT A TIME
2,264 years of an average teacher’s salary
The $163 million in public subsidies Apple collected would fund 2,264 years of an average teacher's salary.