At the end of May, Neil Rimer said something during a meeting I had with him in Athens that I couldn’t avoid. In a new and vibrant technology festival In the city, speaking about the wealth accumulating around AI, he said he has “a strong feeling that there will be some kind of redistribution.” Continuous. “It will be voluntary or involuntary, but it will happen, and I hope it will be voluntary,” he told me, adding that he believes tech leaders “can play a leadership role in making it happen.”
Coming from most people, that would sound like standard populism. Coming from Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last three decades, it seemed somewhat surprising to say in public.
Rimer stopped day-to-day investing in 2021 and these days spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He arrived at our interview in a rumpled shirt and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knits that characterize many of his peers. However, Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the company has raised approximately $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year’s exits including Figma’s initial public offering and Google’s purchase of cybersecurity company Wiz. The index reportedly earned approximately $9 billion..
Rimer has found ways to give back. He is a member of the board of directors of Endeavor Greece, which advises entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of directors of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he, his father and two brothers donated $13 million to McGill University to renovate the campus building, now the Rimer Building, and founded a new Indigenous Knowledge and Research Institute.
Meanwhile, his comment about redistribution comes at a strange time, for being charitable, for giving. The Giving Pledge, the pledge that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to commit half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in its first five years, then 72, then 43, and then just four in all of 2024, according to a New York Times. report in march That underscored how passé philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech. (Noted that article: “Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has said that his businesses’are philanthropy.'”)
The pattern appears to hold beyond the Compromise. Total American charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has declined five years in a rowa decline of 4.5% in 2024 alone, according to Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; About half do so now, and data from Bank of America and Lilly Family School show that even donations from wealthy households have declined, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
The pattern also appears in Index’s own portfolio, which includes anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them anthropic employees with ties to effective altruism, were committed to giving away the majority of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charities, and some of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most didn’t incorporate philanthropy into their plans at all; they were focused on angel investments or starting their own companies. “That’s what I see more than the desire to be philanthropic,” he told the media.
As expected, the absence of voluntary donations now clashes with attempts to legislate the outcome. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida to be on the safe side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering go public in 2027and cynically, a reason inter alia The tax, if passed, is likely to calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets at the end of this calendar year.
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of opposition to any type of wealth redistribution measure on this scale, including from Governor Gavin Newsom and economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after seeing their wealthy residents flee.
Other options on the table are equally controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed giving the federal government a 5% shareholdingan idea that CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing the benefits of AI with the public, but critics see it more as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In any case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam at the payroll table. Veteran investor Roelof Botha joked during a sit separately with this editor last year: “[Some] One of the most dangerous words in the world is: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
It is worth thinking about how much wealth lies outside of these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX’s initial public offering last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes told 45 new AI billionaires In its 2026 ranking alone, it’s worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before Anthropic or OpenAI go public. In that same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will have enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all the homes in the San Francisco metropolitan area.
He it feels unprecedented, but whether it represents a historical extreme is a matter of debate. The proportion of wealth in the hands of the richest. The top 1% of American households reached 31.7%. in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and about equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile had combined.
That’s still below the 45% the top 1% had at the peak of the Gilded Age in 1916. But if we narrow the lens to the top, the picture changes. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman estimates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, the four largest fortunes in the United States were together worth 4% of US GDP. Today, that same portion of the population (now 19 homes instead of four, it is worth 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have a precedent from the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the height of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay in which he argued that a rich man should treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the public good during his own lifetime, calling it a shameful thing to die rich. That essay, “The gospel of wealth”, became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
However, it did not stop the other path for long. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share our wealthdemanding high taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for all Americans. Worried about losing working-class support for Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed for what the press called the “rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate to 79%. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of a politically forced redistribution that occurred once voluntary donations failed to adequately address the pressure building beneath it.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has dedicated his career to the technology sector. What he finds most curious is “the moral center of tech companies,” a fascination he traces back to when he was a Stanford student in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was genuinely good for the world.
What worries him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain technology companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette manufacturers.
Critics may point out that Rimer, as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies, is a direct beneficiary of the windfall that he says will eventually have to be shared. But he would rather his fellow beneficiaries decide to return some of the money than have it taken away. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is banking on people choosing the easier way before the story chooses it for them.
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