The bourgeois state makes laws for the bourgeoisie. Therefore, mechanisms exist for them that don't exist for us, that allow the bourgeois to report a 0$ income legally.

People like Jeff Bezos do it in various ways and we'll go through them simply. Firstly, you have to understand what exactly income is. For tax purposes, it's a very specific category of money you tangibly made -- I'm not familiar with US taxation but this is a given in pretty much any system.

Therefore, taking Bezos as an example, his assets are tied to Amazon stocks. He gets no salary for being the CEO/owner, he gets stock. Unless he sells the stock, he has made no income - the stock is capital, it's not income. The IRS calls it 'unrealized gain' because you don't tangibly have that money.

However, they never sell the stock, because that would count as income/capital gain. Instead, they get low-interest loans from specialized banks/funds and pledge the stock as a collateral. The interest is like 2-3%, much lower than the amount they'd have to pay in taxes.

Loans don't count as income either, so no taxes to report. You can even deduct the interest you pay into the loan. And more importantly, they don't repay the loan either. Instead when their stock grows they borrow more and use that to repay the previous loans. They also never pay the collateral (unless the company crashes spectacularly); they pay the interest until they can restructure.

It's as simple as that. Then once in a while do "philanthropy" (giving garbage nobody wants to people you don't care about) for another tax writeoff, or open a "charity" for another method of tax evasion. Some billionaires live on charity funds - their charity which they fund buys a mansion, lets the CEO live in it for free or a nominal fee, and in exchange he promises to rent it out for free one or two days in the year. Other times the company technically owns the assets and "allows" the CEO to use it.

The charity route also lets them give their kids a tax-free inheritance. Instead of giving them money directly, which is heavily taxed, they get their kids on the board of the charity to continue the scheme and give them trust funds backed by stock. This is why Bill Gates said some years ago that his kids would not get a single cent from him when he died. He didn't lie.

Ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers because it's a tax writeoff, even if the team is profitable. He can report player contracts as a tax deduction, while the player has to pay taxes on the income he gets from this contract.

Real estate works in the same way. The IRS considers buildings to deprecate in value over time, so you can write off the deprecation each year. Even as the building gains value and you can rent it, it won't make as much money as deprecation "costs" them money. A 50 million dollar building deprecating over 30 years still allows them to write off 1.85 million in deprecation each year, and that's as much as they're allowed to make from the building.

Where do they get the money to acquire the building and give it a large value from the get-go? With more of those collateral loans.

In this way they can say they "follow the law" and they're right, everything they do is legal. You won't find irregularities in their accounting unless they made a mistake - they have a team of accountants to do this for them. But they wrote the law.