Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out

In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”

Coming from most people, that would sound like standard-issue populism. Coming from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last three decades, it seemed a striking thing to say in public.

Rimer stepped back from 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 turned up to our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knitwear that mark so many of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the firm has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year’s exits including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz reportedly netted Index roughly $9 billion.

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

In the meantime, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment, to be charitable, for giving. The Giving Pledge, the promise 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, then just four in all of 2024, per a New York Times report in March that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech. (Noted that piece: “Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses ‘are philanthropy.’”)

The pattern appears to hold beyond the Pledge. Total American charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has fallen for five straight years, down 4.5% in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; roughly half do now, and Bank of America and Lilly Family School data shows even affluent-household giving has slipped, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.

The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, too, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism, were pledging to give away the bulk of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity, and some of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most weren’t building philanthropy into their plans at all; they were focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,” he told the outlet.

Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving is now running up against attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax that targets 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 going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason among others may be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.

As unsurprisingly, there is plenty of opposition to any kind of wealth-redistribution measure of this scale, including by Governor Gavin Newsom, and including by economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents skedaddle.

Other options on the table are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing AI’s upside with the public, but critics see it instead as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam on the cap table. Joked veteran investor Roelof Botha during a separate sit-down with this editor last year: “[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 through how much wealth sits 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 its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. In that same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.

It feels unprecedented, but whether it represents an historic extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households hit 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.

That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. But narrow the lens to the tippy 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 U.S. GDP. Today, that same sliver of the population — now 19 households instead of four — is worth 14%.

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

It didn’t hold off the other path for long, though. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share Our Wealth, demanding steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate as high as 79%. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution arriving once voluntary giving failed to adequately address the pressure building underneath it.

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 tech companies,” a fascination he traced to being a Stanford undergrad in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and Apple’s other founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was genuinely good for the world.

What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.

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