The Microsoft NOligarchy Profile
A
V
O
I
D
NOligarchy Score
18.7
/ 100
microsoft.com
0
Microsoft’s NOligarchy Score is 18.74 out of 100 — meaning it scores near the very bottom of the accountability scale. In this framework, 100 represents a perfect score of zero political spending and zero legal infractions, so a score of 18.74 signals a company that has pulled nearly every lever of concentrated corporate power available to it: lobbying Congress, funding a Political Action Committee (PAC), handing its chief executive nearly $100 million in a single year, and channeling tens of billions of dollars to shareholders while carrying contested tax positions equal to 17% of its pre-tax income.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
32.3
Wealth Extraction
0.0
Playing by the Rules
21.1
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:
•
Political Access Grade: 32.25/100. Microsoft spent $410,000 on federal lobbying and an additional $1,671,500 through its corporate PAC from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). Combined with more than $2.6 million in executive-level individual donations, the company’s full political footprint is significantly larger than its lobbying line alone suggests.
•
Wealth Extraction Grade: 0.0/100. This is a zero out of 100 — the worst possible mark. Microsoft poured tens of billions of dollars into stock buybacks and dividends across recent fiscal years while its chief executive collected compensation that dwarfs what a typical employee will earn in several lifetimes.
•
Playing by the Rules Grade: 21.12/100. Microsoft recorded two regulatory violations in 2024, totaling just over $14.4 million in penalties — dominated by a single employment discrimination settlement. At the same time, the company collected more than $120 million in government subsidies across 2024 and 2025, flipping the enforcement story on its head.
The Sector Context: Microsoft is the only company currently tracked in the Software publishers sector, so no peer comparison is available. Its score of 18.74 stands on its own as the benchmark for the sector.
The Bottom Line: A Company That Generates Nearly $282 Billion and Sends Almost All of It Upward
Microsoft reported $281.7 billion in annual revenue according to SEC EDGAR 10-K (CIK 0000789019) — a sum large enough to fund the entire federal Department of Education more than four times over. In the two most recently reported fiscal years alone, the company directed $35.7 billion into stock buybacks and $45.9 billion in dividends — a combined $81.5 billion funneled to shareholders. That is real money that did not go to workers, did not go to regulators owed penalties, and — thanks to a tax structure that routes earnings through lower-rate foreign jurisdictions — did not fully go to the United States Treasury either. The sharpest single imbalance in this data is the chasm between what the company’s 480:1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio reveals about who this enterprise is run for, and what the $14.4 million employment discrimination penalty reveals about what can happen to the people it is run on.
Knocking on Washington’s Door — Quietly but Consistently
Microsoft is not the loudest spender in Washington, but it is one of the most methodical. Across Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, the company spent $410,000 on federal lobbying filings disclosed through the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), spread with near-clockwork regularity across every quarter — $50,000 per quarter becoming the baseline rhythm by 2025. That consistency matters: this is not reactive crisis lobbying. It is a permanent presence.
The issue areas Microsoft’s lobbyists covered explain exactly why a company that sells cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, operating systems, and enterprise software would want sustained access to federal policymakers. Immigration — specifically high-skilled immigration, reform, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) — appeared in filings alongside Homeland Security, Intelligence, Telecommunications, and Taxation, each logged 8 times. Microsoft’s entire business model depends on recruiting the world’s top engineers; visa policy and immigration rules are not abstract political questions for the company — they directly determine who it can hire and at what cost. Lobbyists referenced the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) repeatedly under both Telecommunications and Intelligence issue codes, a law that governs when the government can compel technology companies to hand over user data stored in cloud services — precisely the kind of infrastructure Microsoft sells to governments and enterprises worldwide. Taxation filings appeared across multiple quarters, reflecting ongoing engagement on tax reform as the company maintains a tax structure with significant foreign operations. The Homeland Security filings named cybersecurity, bulk data collection, surveillance, lawful access, and AI — all areas where Microsoft holds major government contracts and where the rules Congress writes will directly shape what the company can sell, and on what terms.
Microsoft’s PAC contributed $1,671,500 to federal candidates and committees over the two-year period, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. The split was 56.7% to Democratic recipients and 43.3% to Republican recipients — a deliberate hedge that keeps the company’s checkbook welcome on both sides of the aisle regardless of which party controls the chamber. On top of that, Microsoft executives individually donated $2,640,494 to federal candidates and committees, as recorded in FEC filings — a sum that nearly doubles the official corporate PAC total. Add all three channels together — lobbying, PAC, and executive donations — and Microsoft’s combined political footprint across the two-year period exceeds $4.7 million.
Microsoft's PAC gave $538,000 to Democrats and $411,000 to Republicans — a 56.7% / 43.3% split that buys access to whichever party wins.
56.7%
43.3%
Democrats · $538,000
Republicans · $411,000
ACCESS-BUYER PENALTY APPLIED
Five of Microsoft’s ten registered lobbyists previously held government positions. Grant Barbosa served as a legislative aide to Senator Kamala Harris. Erin Siefring was chief of staff to Representative Dave Brat and legislative director to Representative Tom Feeney. Vanessa Valdez worked as a legislative correspondent for Senator John Ossoff. Ingrid Duran served as assistant banking committee staff for Representative Gene Green. Juan Rangel was a legislative assistant to Representative Linda Sanchez. These are not lawyers who learned government from the outside — they are former insiders who know which hallway to walk down, which staffer to call, and how the machinery of Congress actually moves.
A $96 Million CEO, $81 Billion to Shareholders, and a Pay Gap That Defies Comprehension
Microsoft’s chief executive took home compensation of 480:1 relative to the median employee, according to the company’s SEC DEF 14A proxy statement. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $96.5 million. The median Microsoft employee earned $200,972 that same year — meaning the person at the top collected in a single year what it would take the typical Microsoft worker 480 years to earn at current salary levels.
CEO — MEDIAN-PAY MARKER
JANUARY
9:00
10:00
11:00
12:00
1:00
1:20 PM — a median year, earned
2:00
passes the median employee’s full annual pay
1:20 PM · January 1
480× the median employee’s pay
At 480:1, Microsoft's CEO earns the median employee's entire annual pay by 1:20 PM on the first workday of the year.
The Shareholder Payout: In fiscal years 2024 and 2025, Microsoft spent $17.3 billion and $18.4 billion respectively buying back its own stock — a combined $35.7 billion over two years — according to SEC 10-K filings. Buybacks are a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. Over the same two years, Microsoft also paid $21.8 billion and $24.1 billion in dividends — another $45.9 billion handed to shareholders. The combined $81.5 billion in shareholder payouts across just those two fiscal years went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of all stock.
The Missed Raise: The SEC proxy filing does not disclose Microsoft’s total employee headcount — so it is not possible to calculate a precise per-worker figure from the buyback total. What is possible is this: Microsoft directed $35.7 billion into buybacks in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 combined. The company made a deliberate choice to send that money to Wall Street instead of its workforce. The scale of that figure — more than $35 billion channeled to share repurchases versus roughly $14.5 million paid in regulatory penalties the same year — illustrates the distance between what Microsoft invests in enriching shareholders and what it costs the company to settle legal violations.
The Dividend Factor: Microsoft did not abandon traditional dividends in favor of buybacks — it ran both simultaneously and at massive scale. In fiscal year 2025 alone, it paid $24.1 billion in dividends on top of $18.4 billion in buybacks. The company could have paid out every dollar of those dividends and still had $35.7 billion to direct toward workers. It chose not to. The dual-channel approach — buybacks plus dividends — represents the fullest possible extraction of corporate cash away from earnings and toward capital owners.
Executive Bonuses: Buybacks mechanically reduce the number of shares in circulation, which compresses the denominator in Earnings Per Share (EPS) calculations and pumps the reported EPS figure upward — directly triggering the performance bonuses tied to that metric for the same executives who approved the buyback programs. At a 480:1 pay ratio, the CEO’s earnings are already structurally insulated from the experience of the median worker; buybacks are the mechanism that keeps that gap climbing.
Tax Avoidance: Microsoft paid an effective tax rate of 17.6% — 3.4 percentage points (pp) below the 21% federal statutory rate that Congress set.
The company’s 10-K discloses several items that cut the tax bill below the statutory rate. The largest single rate-reducing item in the reconciliation is foreign earnings taxed at lower rates (–1.5 pp), tied directly to Microsoft’s foreign regional operations center in Ireland, which generated 81% of foreign income before tax in fiscal year 2025. Additional rate-cutting mechanisms disclosed in the filing include the Foreign-Derived Intangible Income (FDII) deduction (–1.0 pp), research and development credits (–1.1 pp), excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation (–0.9 pp), and other reconciling items (–1.4 pp). State income taxes added back 1.5 pp and interest added 1.0 pp, partially offsetting those reductions. The filing also discloses that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued Notices of Proposed Adjustment for tax years 2004 to 2013 seeking $28.9 billion in additional taxes, penalties, and interest, with the primary disputes centered on intercompany transfer pricing.
Microsoft chose to pay 3.4 pp less than the rate Congress set. That gap is not an accounting accident — it is a structural decision that shifts real tax burden off Microsoft’s balance sheet and onto everyone else. On top of that, Microsoft holds Unrecognized Tax Benefits equal to 17.0% of its pre-tax income — contested deductions it has claimed on its taxes that the IRS has not yet agreed are valid.
A $14 Million Discrimination Settlement, a $121 Million Subsidy Haul, and a Company That Collected Far More Than It Paid
Microsoft recorded two violations in 2024, totaling $14,466,766 in penalties, according to Good Jobs First. These figures cover the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026; the source site contains the company’s full historical record, which extends well beyond this window.
The Pattern: Employment discrimination accounts for $14,425,000 of the $14.47 million total — a single case representing 99.7% of all penalties recorded during the tracked period. The remaining $41,766 came from a separate environmental violation. Two cases across a single year does not constitute a long pattern, but the scale of the discrimination settlement — and its near-total dominance of the penalty ledger — makes the category impossible to treat as an isolated footnote.
The Big Case: In 2024, California’s Civil Rights Department (CA-CRD) levied a $14,425,000 penalty against Microsoft for employment discrimination. A company that generated $281.7 billion in annual revenue settled that case for an amount equivalent to roughly 0.005% of its sales — a sum the finance department would round to zero on a revenue chart.
The Subsidy Flip: While regulators were collecting that $14.4 million discrimination settlement, governments were simultaneously handing Microsoft $120,996,468 across 8 grants in 2024 and 2025 — more than eight times what the company paid in total penalties, according to Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker. The largest single grant was $75,348,124, followed closely by a second grant worth $39,268,264. In net terms, Microsoft received more than $106 million more in government subsidies than it paid in government penalties across the same period — a transfer flowing in the opposite direction from what the enforcement story alone would suggest.
EXHIBIT — ONE TEACHER-YEAR AT A TIME
1,681 years of an average teacher’s salary
The $121 million in public subsidies Microsoft collected would fund 1,681 years of an average teacher's salary.