Neil Rimer and the Inevitable Redistribution of AI Wealth

Neil Rimer and the Inevitable Redistribution of AI Wealth

At the end of May, during an interview in Athens, Neil Rimer shared a thought that resonated widely. At a lively tech festival, he spoke about the wealth accumulated around artificial intelligence (AI) and expressed his belief that a redistribution of this wealth was inevitable. He clarified that this redistribution could be voluntary or forced, but it would happen inevitably. Rimer hopes that tech leaders will play an active role in this process.

For many, these remarks might seem like traditional populism. However, coming from Neil Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture capital firms of the past thirty years, these statements take on a particular significance.

Rimer stepped back from daily investing in 2021 and now spends a lot of time in Athens, his wife's hometown, where his children enjoy their Greek passports. During our meeting, he wore a wrinkled shirt and jeans, contrasting with the more formal attire of his peers. Yet, Index Ventures' recent performance is impressive: since its inception, the firm has raised approximately $15 billion from external investors, and last year's exits, such as Figma's IPO and Google's acquisition of cybersecurity firm Wiz, brought in about $9 billion to Index.

Rimer has also found ways to give back to society. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, an organization that supports entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and has chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. At the end of 2021, he, his father, and his two brothers donated $13 million to McGill University to renovate a campus building, now named the Rimer Building, and to establish a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledge.

His comment on redistribution comes at a particular moment for philanthropy. The Giving Pledge, an initiative launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in 2010 to encourage billionaires to give away half of their wealth to charity, seems to be losing its appeal. In the first five years, 113 families signed on, then 72, then 43, and only four for the year 2024, according to a New York Times report in March, highlighting that philanthropy is becoming less valued among the wealthiest in the tech sector. The report mentions that Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, views his businesses as a form of philanthropy.

This phenomenon goes beyond the Giving Pledge. In the United States, charitable donations reached a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans making donations has decreased for five consecutive years, with a 4.5% drop in 2024, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. In the year 2000, two-thirds of households made donations; today, about half do, and data from Bank of America and the Lilly Family School show that even donations from affluent households have declined, dropping from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.

This pattern is also reflected in Index Ventures' portfolio, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently interviewed Alex Caswell, a financial planner, about the philanthropic intentions of his recently wealthy clients, many of whom are employees of Anthropic linked to effective altruism. Anthropic matches employee donations up to 25% of their capital to charities, and some of Caswell's clients have utilized this option, but most prefer to invest or start their own businesses rather than turn to philanthropy. "That's what I see more than the desire to become philanthropic," he told the publication.

The lack of voluntary donations has led to attempts to legislate for the same outcome. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of the state's billionaires. Some, like Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida to escape this tax.

OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason could be that the tax, if adopted, will calculate net worth based on an individual's global assets at the end of that calendar year.

As expected, there is significant opposition to any measure of wealth redistribution of this magnitude, including from Governor Gavin Newsom, as well as economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after seeing their wealthy residents flee.

Other options on the table are equally controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed the possibility of giving the federal government a 5% stake in its capital, an idea that CEO Sam Altman has presented as a way to share AI profits with the public, but critics see it as a means to buy political cover in Washington. In any case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to include Uncle Sam in its capital. Veteran investor Roelof Botha joked during a separate interview with this publication last year: "[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world are: 'I come from the government, and I'm here to help.'"

It is interesting to reflect on the amount of wealth that escapes these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX's IPO last month made him the first person to reach that threshold. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 ranking, worth a total of $2.9 trillion, and this is before Anthropic or OpenAI go public. In the same BI article about Anthropic employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all housing in the San Francisco metropolitan area.

This seems unprecedented, but whether it represents a historical extreme is a matter of debate. The share of wealth held by the top 1% of American households reached 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking this data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held together.

This is still below the 45% that the top 1% commanded at the peak of the Gilded Age in 1916. But if one focuses on the top, the situation changes. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, the four largest fortunes in America represented 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, that same fraction of the population — now 19 households instead of four — is worth 14%.

Rimer's two paths, voluntary or forced, have a precedent from the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the peak of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a rich man should consider his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the public good during his lifetime, calling it shameful to die rich. This essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.

However, this did not delay the other path for long. In the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long built national support behind a program called Share Our Wealth, demanding high taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Concerned about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt enacted what the press called the "rich tax," raising the highest marginal tax rate to 79%. This redistributed less than Long desired, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution occurring once voluntary donations failed to meet the mounting pressure below.

All of this is not new to Rimer, who has spent his career in technology. What intrigues him more is "the moral center of tech companies," a fascination he attributes to his experience as a Stanford student in 1984, when Apple offered the first discounted Macintosh for students and when Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, in his words, "heroes" for building something he considered truly good for the world.

What concerns him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies as a previous generation spoke about defense contractors or cigarette manufacturers.

Critics may note that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct beneficiary of the windfall he says will ultimately need to be shared. But he would prefer to see his peers choose to give back some of the money rather than have it taken from them. There is an easy way to do it and a hard way, and Rimer bets that people will choose the easy path before history does it for them.