During a conversation in Athens this past May, Neil Rimer shared a remark that has lingered with me. Speaking at a lively tech festival in the city, and reflecting on the enormous wealth accumulating around artificial intelligence, the veteran investor said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He went on to say, “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” adding that he believes technology leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”
From most observers, such a statement might read as ordinary populism. But Rimer is a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture capital firms of the past thirty years, making his public comments on the subject particularly notable.
Rimer stepped back from daily investing in 2021 and now spends much of his time in Athens, his wife’s native city and a place where his children value their Greek citizenship. He arrived at our interview in casual attire—a wrinkled button-down and jeans—rather than the polished knitwear typical of many peers. Yet Index has delivered exceptional returns: the firm has raised approximately $15 billion from external investors since inception, and exits last year including Figma’s IPO and Google’s acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz reportedly yielded around $9 billion for Index.
Rimer has pursued ways to contribute. He serves on the board of Endeavor Greece, which supports entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he and his father and 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 Knowledges.
His remarks on redistribution arrive at an awkward time for philanthropy. The Giving Pledge, launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in 2010 to encourage billionaires to donate half their wealth, is losing momentum. According to a March New York Times report, 113 families signed in its first five years, followed by 72, then 43, and only four in 2024, reflecting fading enthusiasm for charity among some of tech’s richest. The article noted that Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said his businesses “are philanthropy.”
The trend extends beyond the pledge. U.S. charitable giving reached a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the share of Americans donating has dropped for five consecutive years, falling 4.5% in 2024 alone per the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households gave in 2000; about half do now. Bank of America and Lilly Family School data show even affluent-household giving declined from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
Index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropic, reflects the pattern. Business Insider recently asked financial planner Alex Caswell whether newly wealthy clients—many Anthropic employees aligned with effective altruism—planned to give away most of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations up to 25% of equity, and some clients used it, Caswell said, but most were not building philanthropy into plans, focusing instead on angel investing or startups. “That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,” he told the outlet.
Not surprisingly, the lack of voluntary giving is now meeting legislative pushback. California voters will decide this year on a one-time 5% wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already relocated primary residences to South Florida as a precaution.
OpenAI is reportedly weighing a 2027 public offering, and cynically, one motive may be that the proposed tax would calculate net worth using worldwide assets as of December 31 this year.
As expected, broad wealth-redistribution proposals face opposition, including from Governor Gavin Newsom and economists who note many industrialized nations repealed similar taxes after 1990 as wealthy residents left.
Other proposals are equally divisive. OpenAI has discussed giving the federal government a 5% equity stake—an idea CEO Sam Altman frames as sharing AI gains with the public, though critics view it as buying political protection. Silicon Valley has historically resisted government ownership. Veteran investor Roelof Botha joked in a separate interview last year: “[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
The wealth outside these mechanisms is substantial. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first to reach that level. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings, worth $2.9 trillion combined, before Anthropic or OpenAI went public. The BI story notes that once those IPOs occur, their employees could hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of San Francisco metro homes.
It feels unprecedented, yet debate continues over whether it is a historic extreme. The top 1% of U.S. households held 31.7% of wealth in Q3 last year—a record since Federal Reserve tracking began in 1989—about equal to the other 90% outside the top decile.
Still, that is below the 45% top 1% held at the 1916 Gilded Age peak. Focusing on the very richest, economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that around 1910 the four largest U.S. fortunes were 4% of GDP; today, the equivalent sliver—19 households—is 14%.
Rimer’s voluntary-or-forced framework echoes the last era of such concentration. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie published “The Gospel of Wealth,” urging the rich to treat fortunes as public trusts and calling it a disgrace to die rich. The essay founded modern philanthropy and inspired the Giving Pledge.
The forced path soon followed. By the mid-1930s, Senator Huey Long promoted Share Our Wealth, demanding steep taxes for a guaranteed income. Fearing lost support, FDR enacted the “soak-the-rich tax,” with top rates up to 79%. It redistributed less than Long sought but remains the clearest U.S. example of forced redistribution when voluntary giving fell short.
Rimer knows this history. He is more intrigued by “the moral center of tech companies,” a interest dating to 1984 at Stanford, when Apple discounted the Macintosh for students and Jobs was a hero for building something good. What troubles him now is hearing his children discuss certain tech firms as earlier generations did defense contractors or tobacco companies.
Critics may note Rimer, as an Anthropic investor, benefits from the windfall he says must be shared. But he prefers beneficiaries choose to give back rather than have it taken. There is an easy way and a hard way, and Rimer bets people choose the easy one before history chooses for them.
