Neil Rimer’s Vision for AI Wealth Redistribution
At the end of May, during a meeting with him in Athens, Neil Rimer said something that I couldn’t shake. At a lively new tech festival in the city, he said he had a “strong feeling that there will be some kind of redistribution” as he spoke about the wealth accumulating around AI. He continued. “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 tech leaders “can play a leading role in pushing this through.”
Rimer’s Background and Influence
From most people’s perspective, this would sound like standard populism. It seemed like a remarkable public statement from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the past three decades.
In 2021, Rimer retired from day-to-day investing and now spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He showed up to our interview in a rumpled button-down shirt and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knits that characterize so many of his colleagues. Still, Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: The company has raised about $15 billion from outside investors since its inception, and exits last year, including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of cybersecurity firm Wiz, reportedly netted Index about $9 billion.
Philanthropy in Decline
Rimer has found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, which serves entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and served as board chair 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 Rimer Building, and establish a new institute for Indigenous research and knowledge.
Meanwhile, his comment on redistribution comes at a strange time to be charitable, to give. The Giving Pledge, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’ promise in 2010 to get billionaires to donate half of their wealth to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in the first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024, according to a New York Times report in March that underscored how unfashionable philanthropy has become among some of the wealthiest people in tech. (Noted this article: “Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has said his businesses are ‘philanthropy.'”)
The Shifting Landscape of Charitable Giving
The pattern seems to apply beyond the promise. Total American charitable donations reached a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has fallen for five years in a row, falling 4.5% in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; now, about half do, and data from Bank of America and Lilly Family School show that even wealthy households’ willingness to donate has declined, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
The pattern is also evident in Index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them Anthropic employees committed to effective altruism, pledged to give 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 taken advantage of this, he told BI, but most have not factored philanthropy into their plans at all; they focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I see more than a desire to become philanthropic,” he told the outlet.
Legislative Measures and Economic Implications
Not surprisingly, the lack of voluntary donations is now met with attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% wealth tax aimed at the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residence to South Florida to be on the safe side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason could be, among other things, that the tax, if passed, would calculate net worth based on an individual’s global wealth as of the end of that calendar year.
Not surprisingly, there is plenty of opposition to any wealth redistribution measure of this magnitude, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom and also from economists, who point out that many developed countries have eliminated similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents stumble.
Controversial Alternatives and Historical Context
Other options on the table are equally controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed giving the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea that CEO Sam Altman framed as intended to share the benefits of AI with the public, but critics instead see it as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In both cases, Silicon Valley was never eager to bring Uncle Sam to the table. Veteran investor Roelof Botha joked during a separate meeting with this editor last year: “[Some] One of the most dangerous words in the world is: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
It’s worth thinking about how much wealth lies outside of these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion after becoming the first person to reach that mark through SpaceX’s IPO last month. In its 2026 rankings alone, Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires with a total value of $2.9 trillion, and that was before Anthropic or OpenAI went public. In the same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their employees will collectively have enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco area.
The Historical Parallels
It feels unprecedented, but whether it represents a historical extreme is debatable. The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households reached 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began collecting data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile owned combined.
That’s still less than the 45% achieved by the top 1% at the height of the Gilded Age in 1916. However, if you tilt the lens to the top, the image rotates. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were collectively worth 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, the same portion of the population – now 19 households instead of four – is worth 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, the voluntary or the coercive path, were precedents for the last time American wealth concentration 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 fund to be distributed for the common good during his lifetime, calling it a disgrace to die rich. This essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual forerunner of the Giving Pledge.
However, the other path didn’t last long. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a nationwide following behind a program called “Share Our Wealth,” which called for high taxes on the rich to provide every American with a guaranteed income. Concerned about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt implemented what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax” by raising the top marginal tax rate to as high as 79%. There was less redistribution than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution after voluntary donations failed to adequately offset underlying pressures.
The Moral Center of Technology
This is nothing new for Rimer, who has spent his career in technology. What makes him more curious is “the moral center of technology companies,” a fascination he traces to his Stanford studies in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he thought was genuinely good for the world.
What worries him now, he said, is that his own children are talking about certain technology companies the way a previous generation talked about defense companies or cigarette makers.
Conclusion: A Call for Voluntary Redistribution
Critics may note that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct beneficiary of the windfall, which he says must ultimately be shared. But he would rather his co-beneficiaries return some of the money than have it taken away from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is banking on people choosing the easy way before history chooses it for them.
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Source: Here
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