In late May, when I sat down with him in Athens, Neil Rimer said something I couldn’t shake. Speaking at the city’s vibrant new technology festival, he spoke about the wealth being built around AI, saying he had a “strong feeling that there would be some kind of redistribution.” He continued. “It may be voluntary or involuntary, but it will happen and we hope it will be voluntary,” he said, adding that technology leaders “can play a leading role in overcoming this.”
To most people, that might sound like standard populism. It seemed like a surprising thing for Rimer, the co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last 30 years, to speak out publicly.
Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021 and these days spends a lot of time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children cherish their Greek passports. He showed up for interviews wearing a rumpled button-down and jeans rather than the quarter-zips and fine knitwear that characterized many of his colleagues. However, the Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional. The company has raised about $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and including Figma’s IPO and Google’s acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz, Index reportedly netted about $9 billion last year.
Rimer found a way to give back. He serves 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, his father and two brothers donated $13 million to McGill University to renovate a campus building (now the Reimer Building) and establish a new Institute for Indigenous Studies and Knowledge.
Meanwhile, his comments on redistribution came at odd moments, both for charity and for donations. The Giving Pledge, a pledge launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in 2010 to get billionaires to donate half their wealth to charity, is becoming increasingly meaningless. According to a New York Times report in March, 113 households signed in the first five years, then 72, then 43, and only four in 2024. It highlights how outdated philanthropy has made some of the wealthiest people in tech. (Notice the article: “Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, says his business ‘is philanthropy.'”)
The pattern appears to hold beyond pledges. Total charitable giving in the U.S. hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, but the number of Americans actually giving has declined for the fifth consecutive year, falling 4.5% in 2024 alone. In 2000, two-thirds of households donated. Now roughly half do so, and donations from wealthier households have also fallen, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year, according to data from Bank of America and Lilly Family School.
This pattern also appears in Index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked financial planner Alex Caswell whether his newly wealthy clients, humanity-loving employees tied to effective altruism, have pledged to give away most of their wealth. Anthropic donates up to 25% of its employees’ shares to charity, and while some of Caswell’s clients have used this, most have not included any philanthropy in their plans, he told BI. They focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I see as more than just a desire to do charity work,” he told the outlet.
Not surprisingly, the absence of voluntary donations is now met with attempts to legislate the consequences. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some people, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida for safety.
OpenAI is reportedly considering a listing in 2027, but one cynical reason could be that if the tax passes, it would calculate net worth based on a person’s global assets as of the end of this year.
Naturally, there is plenty of opposition to any wealth redistribution measure of this magnitude, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom. And that includes economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after seeing their wealthy residents distraught.
Other options on the table are equally controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed giving the federal government a 5% stake. CEO Sam Altman has framed this as sharing the benefits of AI with the public, but critics see it as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never wanted to put Uncle Sam on the cap. Veteran investor Roelof Botha joked in a separate meeting 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 is worth considering how much wealth exists outside of these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion thanks to SpaceX’s IPO last month. In its 2026 ranking alone, Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before Anthropic or OpenAI go public. In the same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, employees of both companies will have enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metropolitan area.
that feel It was unprecedented, but whether it represents a historical extreme is a matter of debate. In the third quarter of last year, the share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households was 31.7%, the highest since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and is almost equal to the wealth held by the remaining 90% of households outside the top decile.
This is still lower than the 45% of the top 1% reached at its Gilded Age peak in 1916. But if you narrow the lens all the way to the top, the picture flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that around 1910, at the height of the Gilded Age, America’s four wealthiest assets were worth 4% of the country’s GDP. Today, the value of that same portion of the population (now 19 households instead of 4) is 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, both voluntary and mandatory, have been in place since the last time wealth concentration in the United States reached this level. In 1889, at the height of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that the rich should treat their wealth as a trust, distributing it for the common good during their lifetimes, and that it would be a shame to die rich. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became a foundational document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
But that didn’t stop the other paths for long. In the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long built a national following through a program called Share Our Wealth, which called for higher taxes on the rich to provide a guaranteed income for all Americans. Franklin Roosevelt, fearful of losing working-class support for Long, promoted what the press called a “rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate to 79 percent. Although this was less redistributive than Long would have liked, it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution after voluntary contributions failed to adequately address the pressures building beneath them.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has a career in technology. What’s more interesting to him is the “moral center of a technology company.” He was a Stanford undergraduate when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students in 1984 and was hooked. Steve Jobs and the other founders of Apple were “heroes” who created something he thought was truly good for the world.
What bothers him now, he said, is hearing his children talk about specific technology companies the way previous generations talked about defense companies or cigarette manufacturers.
Critics may point out that Rimer, as an investor in Anthropic and other technology companies, is the direct beneficiary of a windfall that will eventually have to be shared. But he preferred to give some of his fellow beneficiaries back rather than have their money taken away. There are easy and hard ways to do this, and Rimer is betting that people choose the easy way before history chooses for them.
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