In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been in a position to shake. At a vibrant recent tech festival in town, talking concerning the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a powerful sense that there can be some type of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it surely’ll occur, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a number one role in seeing that through.”
Coming from most individuals, that will sound like standard-issue populism. Coming from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the crucial successful enterprise firms of the last three many years, it seemed a striking thing to say in public.
Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, and today spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He turned as much as our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and wonderful knitwear that mark so lots of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent times have been exceptional: the firm has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last yr’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 present 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 constructing, now the Rimer Constructing, and located a brand new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges.
Within 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. 100 and thirteen families signed in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just 4 in all of 2024, per a Latest York Times report in March that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has develop into amongst among 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 carry beyond the Pledge. Total American charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, however the variety of Americans actually giving has fallen for five straight years, down 4.5% in 2024 alone, based on 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 yr.
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, lots of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism, were pledging to present away the majority of their fortunes. Anthropic matches worker donations of as much as 25% of their equity to charity, and a few of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most weren’t constructing philanthropy into their plans in any respect; they were focused on angel investing or starting their very own corporations. “That’s what I’m seeing greater than the need to develop into philanthropic,” he told the outlet.
Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving is now running up against attempts to legislate the final result as an alternative. California voters will resolve this yr 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 secure side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason amongst others could also be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net value based on a person’s worldwide assets as of the top of this calendar yr.
As unsurprisingly, there’s loads of opposition to any sort of wealth-redistribution measure of this scale, including by Governor Gavin Newsom, and including by economists who indicate 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 general public, but critics see it as an alternative as a solution to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been desperate to put Uncle Sam on the cap table. Joked veteran investor Roelof Botha during a separate sit-down with this editor last yr: “[Some] of essentially the most dangerous words on this planet are: ‘I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to assist.’”
It’s value pondering through how much wealth sits outside these mechanisms. Musk is value just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the primary person to achieve that mark. Forbes counted 45 recent AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, value a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. In that very same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI notes that when Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to purchase nearly a 3rd of all homes within 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 highest 1% of U.S. households hit 31.7% within the third quarter of last yr, a record for the reason that Federal Reserve began tracking the information in 1989, and roughly equal to what the opposite 90% of households outside the highest decile held combined.
That’s still below the 45% the highest 1% commanded on the Gilded Age peak in 1916. But narrow the lens to the tippy top, and the image flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the peak of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s 4 largest fortunes were value a combined 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, that very same sliver of the population — now 19 households as an alternative of 4 — is value 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have precedent from the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the height of the primary Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a wealthy man should treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the general public good inside his own lifetime, calling it a disgrace to die wealthy. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of recent philanthropy and the mental ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
It didn’t hold off the opposite path for long, though. By the mid-Thirties, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share Our Wealth, demanding steep taxes on the wealthy to fund a guaranteed income for each American. Nervous about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the highest marginal income tax rate as high as 79%. It redistributed lower than Long wanted, but it surely stays the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution arriving once voluntary giving did not adequately address the pressure constructing underneath it.
None of that is news to Rimer, who has spent his profession in tech. What’s more curious to him is “the moral center of tech corporations,” a fascination he traced to being a Stanford undergrad in 1984, when Apple discounted the primary Macintosh for college students and Steve Jobs and Apple’s other founders were, in his words, “heroes” for constructing something he felt was genuinely good for the world.
What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children discuss certain tech corporations the best way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.
Critics may note that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech corporations — is a direct beneficiary of the windfall he says will eventually have to be shared. But he’d moderately see his fellow beneficiaries select to present among the a refund than have it taken from them. There’s a simple solution to do that and a tough way, and Rimer is betting on people picking the simple one before history picks it for them.
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