In late May, Neil Rimer said something I couldn’t shake during a sit-down with him in Athens. Live new technology festival Speaking of the wealth building up around AI in the city, he said there was “a strong sense that there’s going to be some kind of redistribution.” 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 said, adding that technology leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that happen.”
Coming from most people, this will sound like standard issue populism. Coming from Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture capital firms of the past three decades, it seemed surprising to say so publicly.
Rimer stepped back from his daily investments in 2021 and these days spends most of his time in Athens, where his wife and children hold Greek passports. He arrived for our interview in a pleated button-down and jeans, rather than the quarter-zip and fine knits that marked many of his peers. However, Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the firm has raised nearly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and exits last year included Figma’s IPO and Google’s acquisition of cybersecurity firm Wiz. The index is said to have netted about $9 billion.
Rimer found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, a company that mentors entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chairs the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019-2025. In late 2021, he, along with his father and two brothers, donated $13 million to McGill University to renovate the campus building. Knowledge.
Meanwhile, his comment on redistribution comes at an odd time to be charitable, to give. The Giving Pledge, the 2010 pledge by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to ensure that billionaires donate half of their wealth to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. According to the New York Times, one hundred and thirteen families signed up in the first five years, then 72, then 43, and then only four in 2024. Report in March It highlighted how philanthropy has fallen out of fashion among the richest people in tech. (That piece was marked: “The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, his businesses ‘there is charity.'”)
The example appears outside of Bail. In 2024, total American charitable giving reached a record high, but the number of Americans reached $592.5 billion in 2024. exactly five yearsAccording to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, it will decrease by 4.5% in 2024 alone. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; About half do now, and data from Bank of America and the Lilly Family School show that even wealthiest families’ donations have fallen from 90% in 2017. 81% last year.
The pattern is also reflected in the Index’s own portfolio includes anthropic. Business Insider recently asked financial planner Alex Caswell if his nouveau riche clients, many of whom are committed to effective altruism, have pledged to give most of their wealth away. Anthropic matches up to 25% of employees’ equity on charitable contributions, and some of Caswell’s clients have taken advantage of it, he told BI, but most haven’t included philanthropy in their plans; they were focused on angel investment or starting their own companies. “This is what I see more than a desire to be a philanthropist” he said in his speech.
Not surprisingly, the lack of voluntary donation now counters efforts to legitimize the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences South Florida to be on the safe side.
OpenAI is said to be reviewing It will be presented to the public in 2027and shamefully, a reason among others it is possible that if the tax is passed, it will calculate the net worth based on the individual’s worldwide assets at the end of the calendar year.
Not surprisingly, there is plenty of opposition to a wealth redistribution measure of this magnitude, including Governor Gavin Newsom. economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents go skedaddle.
Other options in the table are also controversial. OpenAI is reportedly discussing a handover to the federal government 5% equity stakeCEO Sam Altman has framed the idea as sharing the positives of AI with the public, but critics see it instead as a way to buy political cover in Washington. Either way, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam on the hat table. joked veteran investor Roelof Botha separate seating with this editor last year: “(Some) are the most dangerous words in the world: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’
It is worth considering how much wealth lies beyond these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that milestone. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires It’s only worth $2.9 trillion at its 2026 valuation alone, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI go public. In that BI story on Anthropic employees, BI notes that after Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will have enough wealth to buy about a third of all the homes in metro San Francisco.
This feels unprecedented, but whether this represents a historical extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth that the superior owns The top 1% of households in the US has reached 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and about the same as the other 90% of households outside the top decile.
This is still below the 45% commanded by the top 1% in 1916 at the height of the Gilded Age. But zoom the lens up and the image rotates. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes accounted for 4% of US GDP. Today, that segment of the population – now 19 households instead of four – worth 14%.
Rimer’s two ways, voluntary or involuntary, before the ultimate concentration of American wealth reaches 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 during his lifetime for the public good, and that it would be a shame to die rich. That essay “The Wealth Bible,” became a seminal document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
Although he did not stop the other way for a long time. In the mid-1930s, a Louisiana senator named Huey Long had built a national following. Share Our Wealthit requires higher taxes on the wealthy to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Concerned about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt proposed what the press called the “soak the rich tax” and raised the top marginal income tax rate to 79%. It was less redistricted than Long would have liked, but it remains the most egregious example of politically forced redistricting in American history.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in technology. What interests him more is the “spiritual center of technology companies”. It’s a fascination he studied as an undergraduate at Stanford in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, in his words, “heroes” that he thought were truly good for the world.
What worries him now, he said, is hearing his children talk about certain technology companies the same way previous generations talked about defense companies or cigarette manufacturers.
Critics may point out that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is directly benefiting from the windfall, which he says will eventually have to be shared. But he prefers to see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give back rather than take some of the money from them. There’s an easy way and a hard way to do it, and Rimer is betting that people will choose the easy way before history makes the choice for them.
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