At the end of May, Neil Rimer said something when I sat down with him in Athens that I couldn’t shake. At an event for new technologies in the city, talking about the wealth that is accumulating around AI, he said that he “has a strong sense that there will be some kind of redistribution.” He continued. “It’s going to be voluntary or it’s going to be automatic, but it’s going to happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks technology leaders “can play a leading role in realizing that.”
Coming from the masses, that would sound like standard-issue populism. From Rimer, the founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful companies of the last three decades, it seems a remarkable thing to say publicly.
Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, and these days he spends most of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children value their Greek passports. He arrived at our interview in a button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fancy knits that mark many of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent years have been extraordinary: the company has raised nearly $15 billion from outside investors since its inception, and last year’s exits including the IPO of Figma and Google’s purchase of cybersecurity firm Wiz are reported to have netted Index nearly $9 billion.
Rimer found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, mentoring entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chairs the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he and his father and two brothers gave McGill University $13 million to renovate the campus building, now the Rimer Building, and found a new Indigenous Research and Knowledge Center.
Meanwhile, his comments about redistribution come at an odd time, giving, giving. The Giving Pledge, the promise Warren Buffett and Bill Gates started in 2010 to get billionaires to donate part of their wealth to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed on in its first five years, then 72, then 43, and then just four in 2024, according to a New York Times report in March that underscored how outmoded the generosity has been among some of the world’s richest people in technology. (Note that piece: “Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, said his businesses ‘there is philanthropy.’”)
The pattern seems to hold beyond the Promise. Total American giving will reach a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans giving has declined for five consecutive years, falling only 4.5% in 2024, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of the houses contributed in 2000; about half now, and data from Bank of America and the Lilly Family School show that even the giving of the wealthy has declined, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
The pattern is visible in the Index portfolio, too, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, if his newly wealthy clients, many of whom are Anthropic employees tied to successful philanthropy, were committing to giving away a large portion of their wealth. Anthropic matches employee contributions 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 build philanthropy into their plans at all; they focused on angel investment or founded their own companies. “That’s what I see more than the desire to help the community,” he told the media.
Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving is now facing efforts to stop the effect instead. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Others, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their residences to South Florida to be on the safe side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and ironically, one reason among others would be that the tax, if passed, would calculate net worth based on a person’s global assets as of the end of this calendar year.
Unsurprisingly, there is much opposition to any kind of wealth redistribution measure of this scale, including Governor Gavin Newsom, and including economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed the same wealth tax since 1990 after watching their wealthy citizens skedaddle.
The other options on the table are controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed giving the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea CEO Sam Altman has pitched as public sharing of AI, but critics see it as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In any case, Silicon Valley has never been interested in putting Uncle Sam at the table. Seasoned investor, Roelof Botha, when he sat down with this editor last year: “[Some] the most dangerous words in the world are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
It is good to think how much wealth remains outside of these methods. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes listed 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 estimates alone, worth $2.9 billion, and that’s before Anthropic or OpenAI go public. In that BI story about Anthropic’s employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy about a third of all the homes in the San Francisco metro area.
It feels unprecedented, but whether it represents a historical extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth owned by the top 1% of US households reached 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 that of the other 90% of households outside the top decile combined.
That’s still less than 45% of the top 1% commanded at the height of the Gold Age in 1916. But zoom the lens up, and the image is reversed. The famous economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Prosperity Era, around 1910, America’s wealth was equal to 4% of the combined US GDP. Today, that population – now 19 households instead of four – accounts for 14%.
Rimer’s two methods, voluntary or involuntary, have precedents since the last time American wealth accumulation reached this level. In 1889, at the height of the First Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay saying that a rich man should treat his wealth as a trust to be distributed for the benefit of society during his lifetime, calling it a shame to die rich. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” was the first document of modern generosity and the wise ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
However, it didn’t last long. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built the country on a plan called Share Our Wealth, which called for higher taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing labor support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt passed what the press called a “rich tax,” raising the top income tax rate to 79%. It was redistributed below what was long sought, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution to the point where voluntary giving failed to adequately address the structure of oppression beneath it.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in technology. What is most puzzling him is the “ethic center of technology companies,” an interest he pursued as a student at Stanford in 1984, when Apple released the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, in his words, “heroes” to build something he felt was good for the world.
What worries him now, he said, is hearing his children talk about certain technology companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or tobacco manufacturers.
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 distributed. But he prefers to see his fellow beneficiaries choose to return some of the money rather than have it taken from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard one, and Rimer is betting on people choosing the easy way before history chooses it for them.
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