system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do corporations and wealthy individuals minimise their tax? Can a 'regular joe' use the same techniques?

Kerry Packer (at one time Australia's richest man) once said to a governmental enquiry: 

"I am not evading tax in any way, shape or form. Now of course I am minimizing my tax and if anybody in this country doesn't minimize their tax they want their heads read."

How do the wealthy and big corporations minimise their tax?  Are these same techniques available to everyone else?
gpt
Others have given you an answer, but not very good, concise answers... 

Everyone can, and does, minimize their taxes.  A great many individuals donate cars, clothes, etc, and take those donations as deductions against their taxes; that is tax avoidance, just the same as companies do.  

The difference is that companies and wealthy people have much larger sums of money with which to play.  

There are several individual tricks which are only available to certain taxable entities (corporations and partnerships).  A person in a partnership, for example, can turn almost all of his income into capital gains and therefore greatly reduce his tax burden.  Capital gains rates have been modified recently, but they used to be 15% whereas a wealthy person could be paying around 40% in income taxes.  When we're talking about millions per year, that is a great savings.  

But doing this is all completely provided for in the tax code, it is a feature, not a bug; therefore it is not a loophole but mere, legal, avoidance.  

Generally, how partners in a partnership can characterize their income as capital assets is: all the income, according to the law, passes through the partnership to the individuals.  Then, and this is the "trick," the individuals loan that money to the entity which then pays the individuals payments on the loan; those payments are characterized as capital investments of the individual and not regular income.