Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out

At the end of May, during a conversation with him in Athens, Neil Rimer said something that I couldn’t shake. Here’s to a vibrant new one technical festival in town, speaking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong feeling that there will be some kind of redistribution.” He continued. “It will either be voluntary or involuntary, but it will happen, and I hope it is voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks technology leaders “can play a leadership role in making that happen.”

To most people that would sound like standard populism. Coming from Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture capital firms of the past thirty years, it seemed striking to say this publicly.

Rimer relinquished his daily investments in 2021 and now spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children cherish their Greek passports. He came to our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knits that characterize so many of his colleagues. Still, Index’s returns have been exceptional in recent years, with the company raising roughly $15 billion from outside investors since its inception, and last year’s exits including Figma’s initial public offering and Google’s purchase of cybersecurity company Wiz Index reportedly netted approximately $9 billion.

Rimer has found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, which guides entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he, his father and two brothers gave $13 million to McGill University to renovate a campus building, now the Rimer Building, and established a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges.

Meanwhile, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd time: out of charity, out of charity. The Giving Pledge, the promise that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to donate half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in the first five years, then 72, then 43 and then just four in all of 2024, according to a New York Times March report That underscored how outdated philanthropy has become among some of the wealthiest people in the tech sector. (That piece also noted: “Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has said that his companies ‘Are philanthropy.'”)

The pattern seems to go beyond the Promise. Total U.S. charitable giving reached a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has fallen by five consecutive yearsa 4.5% decline in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. In 2000, two-thirds of households donated; about half now do so, and data from Bank of America and Lilly Family School show that even donations to affluent households have fallen, from 90% in 2017 to Last year 81%.

The pattern also emerges in Index’s own portfolio includes anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of whom were anthropic workers linked to effective altruism, were pledging to give away most of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their assets to charities, and some Caswell clients have taken advantage of this, he told BI, but most did not build philanthropy into their plans at all; they were focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I see more than the desire to become philanthropic,” he said to the outlet.

Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary donations is now met with attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% wealth tax aimed at the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences South Florida to stay on the safe side.

OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027and cynically, one reason among others It is possible that the tax, if passed, will calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide wealth at the end of this calendar year.

It will come as no surprise that there is strong opposition to any wealth redistribution measure of this magnitude, including from Governor Gavin Newsom, and also from economists who point out that many industrialized countries have abolished similar wealth taxes since 1990 after seeing their wealthy residents gouging.

Other options on the table are just as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing over one 5% equity interestan idea that CEO Sam Altman has proposed as a way to share the benefits of AI with the public, but critics instead see it as a way to buy political cover in Washington. Be that as it may, Silicon Valley has never liked putting Uncle Sam on the list. Experienced investor Roelof Botha joked last year during a separate conversation with this editor: “[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

It’s worth thinking about how much wealth falls outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in the 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before Anthropic or OpenAI have gone 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 equity to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.

It feels unprecedented, but whether this is a historical extreme is a matter of debate. The share of wealth held by those at the top 1% of US households reached 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began keeping the data in 1989, and about equal to what the remaining 90% of households outside the top decile owned combined.

That’s still below the 45% that the top 1% owned at the peak of the Gilded Age in 1916. But narrow the lens to the pointy top and the picture flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of US gross domestic product (GDP). Today, that same segment of the population – now 19 households instead of four – is worth 14%.

Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or coerced, have precedent since the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the height of the First Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a wealthy man should treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed within his own lifetime for the greater good. He called it a shame to die rich. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual precursor to the Giving Pledge.

However, it did not take long before the other path was taken. By the mid-1930s, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana had built a national following behind a program called Share our wealthdemanding high taxes on the wealthy to finance a guaranteed income for every American. Concerned about Long’s loss of working-class support, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate to 79%. There was less redistribution than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically coerced redistribution that came about when voluntary donations failed to adequately address the pressures that arose.

None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in tech. What’s more curious to him is “the moral center of technology companies,” a fascination he traces to his college days at Stanford in 1984, when Apple left out the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he thought was truly 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 companies.

Critics may note that Rimer – as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies – is a direct beneficiary of the windfall that he believes will ultimately have to be shared. But he would rather see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give back some of the money rather than have it taken from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is betting that people will choose the easy way before history chooses it for them.