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. In a live news technology festival in the city, talking about the wealth accumulating around artificial intelligence, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some kind of redistribution.” Continue. “It’s either going to be voluntary or it’s going to be involuntary, but it’s going to happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he believes technology leaders “can play a leading role in making it happen.”
Coming from most people, this would sound like typical populism. Coming from Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture capital firms of the last three decades, it seemed like an impressive thing to say publicly.
Rimer retired 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 came to our interview in button-ups and jeans, not the zip-ups and fine knits that mark so many of his peers. But Index’s returns in recent years have been stellar: the company has raised about $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year’s exits included Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of cybersecurity firm Wiz The index reportedly closed at about $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 new campus building for the Research Institute, now the Rimer. Knowledge.
Meanwhile, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd time, to be charitable, to offer. The Giving Pledge, the promise Warren Buffett and Bill Gates made in 2010 to convince billionaires to give half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed up in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024, according to the New York Times exhibition in March This underscored how unfashionable philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech. (Note this piece: “Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, said his businesses”hectare charity.'”)
The pattern seems to apply beyond the Pledge. Total US charitable giving to hit record $592.5 billion in 2024, but number of Americans actually giving falls five years in a rowa 4.5% drop in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households gave in 2000. About half do so now, and data from Bank of America and the Lilly Family School show that even wealthy households have declined, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
The pattern also appears in the Index portfolio, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, if his newly wealthy clients, many of whom were Anthropic employees associated with effective altruism, would commit to giving away most of their wealth. 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 don’t factor philanthropy into their plans at all. focused on getting angel investment or starting their own companies. “I see that more than a desire to be a philanthropist.” he said to the outlet.
Not surprisingly, the absence of a voluntary offer is now hampering efforts to legislate the result. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5 percent wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences South Florida be on the safe side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering the possibility will go public in 2027and cynically, a reason among others may the tax, if passed, calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of that calendar year.
Unsurprisingly, there is plenty of opposition to any kind of wealth redistribution measure of this scale, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom and economists who point out that many industrialized countries have abolished similar wealth taxes since the 1990s after seeing their wealthy residents flounder.
Other options on the table are equally controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed giving the federal government one 5% equity stakean idea that CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing the good of artificial intelligence with the public, but critics see it as a way to buy political coverage in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been willing to bring Uncle Sam to the table. Veteran investor Roelof Botha joked during a separate meeting with this publisher last year:[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world is: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
It is worth considering how much wealth lies outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that level. Forbes counted 45 New AI Billionaires in its 2026 ranking alone, totaling $2.9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI go public. In the same BI story on 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 homes in the San Francisco metro area.
The feels unprecedented, but whether it represents a historic tipping point is up for debate. The share of wealth held 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 what the remaining 90% of households outside the top decile collectively owned.
That’s still below the 45% that commanded the top 1% at the height of the Gilded Age in 1916. But narrow the lens to the stiff top and the picture flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman estimates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of US GDP. Today, the same segment of the population — now 19 households instead of four — worth 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have precedent since the last time the concentration of American wealth reached this level. In 1889, at the height of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a rich man should treat his wealth as a trust to be distributed for the common good during his lifetime, calling it a shame to die rich. This essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the spiritual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
However, the other path did not last long. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share our Wealthrequiring steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt promoted what the press called “taxing the rich,” raising the top marginal income tax rate as high as 79 percent. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically coercive redistribution arrived at when the voluntary offering failed to adequately address the building of pressure from below.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in technology. What’s more curious about him is “the moral center of tech companies,” a fascination he found in being an undergraduate at Stanford in 1984, when Apple cut the first Macintoshes for students and Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was truly good for the world.
What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies the way a previous 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 he will eventually have to share. But he would rather see his other beneficiaries choose to give some of the money back than have it taken away. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is betting on people to choose the easy way before history chooses it for them.
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