Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet are the five largest corporations by market cap, with the value of their combined shares totaling more than $16 trillion. These firms each pull in multiple billions of dollars in profit annually, and so pay tens of billions of dollars in annual taxes, too.

But like other corporate giants in the S&P 500, the companies are also spending massive amounts on shareholder payouts, funneling trillions of dollars to wealthy shareholders through stock buybacks and shareholder dividends.

Over the past five years, those five largest companies spent more than $1 trillion on stock buybacks and dividends, according to a new analysis from Oxfam—more than five times what they paid in federal taxes over the same time period.

Looking at the entire S&P 500, th

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