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In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven\u2019t been in a position to shake. At a vibrant recent tech festival<\/a> in town, talking concerning the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has \u201ca powerful sense that there can be some type of a redistribution.\u201d He continued on. \u201cIt\u2019ll either be voluntary or it\u2019ll be involuntary, but it surely\u2019ll occur, and I hope it\u2019s voluntary,\u201d he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders \u201ccan play a number one role in seeing that through.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s returns in recent times have been exceptional: the firm has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last yr\u2019s exits including Figma\u2019s IPO and Google\u2019s purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz reportedly netted Index roughly $9 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has develop into amongst among the richest people in tech. (Noted that piece: \u201cElon Musk, the world\u2019s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses \u2018are<\/em>\u00a0philanthropy.\u2019\u201d)<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n The pattern shows up in Index\u2019s own portfolio, too, which includes Anthropic<\/a>. 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\u2019s clients have used it, he told BI, but most weren\u2019t constructing philanthropy into their plans in any respect; they were focused on angel investing or starting their very own corporations. \u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019m seeing greater than the need to develop into philanthropic,\u201d he told the outlet<\/a>. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida<\/a> to be on the secure side. <\/p>\n OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027<\/a>, and cynically, one reason amongst others<\/a> could also be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net value based on a person\u2019s worldwide assets as of the top of this calendar yr. <\/p>\n 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<\/a> who indicate that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents skedaddle. <\/p>\n Other options on the table are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake<\/a>, an idea CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing AI\u2019s 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: \u201c[Some] of essentially the most dangerous words on this planet are: \u2018I\u2019m from the federal government, and I\u2019m here to assist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s value pondering through how much wealth sits outside these mechanisms. Musk is value just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX\u2019s IPO last month made him the primary person to achieve that mark. Forbes counted 45 recent AI billionaires<\/a> in its 2026 rankings alone, value a combined $2.9 trillion, and that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It feels<\/em> 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%<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n That\u2019s 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\u2019s 4 largest fortunes were value a combined 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, that very same sliver of the population \u2014 now 19 households<\/a> as an alternative of 4 \u2014 is value 14%.<\/p>\n Rimer\u2019s 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, \u201cThe Gospel of Wealth<\/a>,\u201d became the founding document of recent philanthropy and the mental ancestor of the Giving Pledge. <\/p>\n