When someone asks you how much you “make” do you subtract expenses first and only state your year end profit? Or are you hung up on “revenue”, which is the word for what that figure represents?

And top level staff absolutely does make their money in Philly and take it somewhere else, regardless of their company’s revenue or net profit year to year, and that is where it gets taxed for the purposes of this discussion (this process of taking something from somewhere where it is created and moving it somewhere else is also known as extraction).

Again - the richest guy in the whole state has his HQ out of Philly, but is not living here. He lives in Montgomery County. Philly’s biggest companies are almost all headed by executives making millions of dollars, but who live over the border, and the same can be said of their second tier staff. Dude that owns the Philadelphia Eagles (personal net worth in the $3-$4 billion range)? Montgomery County. The billionaire that owns most of the Phillies? Bryn Mawr.

In 2019, seven of the city’s biggest corporations (which includes Aramark) spent $2 billion across 19 categories of locally deliverable goods and services (construction, IT, security/public safety, pest control services, courier services, catering, architecture/design, lab supplies, facilities management, communications/public relations, business advisory consulting, special event planning, lobbying, accounting, personal protective equipment, legal services, and insurance.). Only 22.5% of that money was spent within the city.

Lots of money is made in Philadelphia - but a ton of it gets funneled directly out to the suburbs.