Neil Rimmer believes the AI ​​money will come back

In late May, Neil Rimmer said something while I was sitting with him in Athens that I couldn’t shake. At the city’s vibrant new technology festival, speaking of the wealth accumulating around artificial intelligence, he said he had a “strong sense that there will be some kind of redistribution.” He continued. “It will be voluntary or involuntary, but it will happen, and I hope it will be voluntary,” he told me, adding that he believes technology leaders “can play a leading role in making this happen.”

To most people, this might sound like normative-issue populism. Coming from Remer, co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the past three decades, it seemed eye-catching in the open.

Remer has stepped back from daily investing in 2021, and these days he spends most of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children cherish their Greek passports. He came to our interview wearing rumpled, button-down jeans, not the quarter zips and fancy knits that characterize so many of his peers. However, the index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: The company has raised nearly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and exits last year, including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of cybersecurity firm Waze, reportedly generated nearly $9 billion.

Reimer has found ways to give 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, his father, and two brothers gave $13 million to McGill University to renovate the campus building, now the Rimmer Building, and establish a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledge.

Meanwhile, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment, to be charitable, charitable. The Giving Pledge, the promise made by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in 2010 to get billionaires to devote half their wealth to charity, has become increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed up in the first five years, then 72, then 43, and then just four in 2024, according to a New York Times report in March, which underscored how philanthropy has fallen out of fashion among some of the richest people in tech. (Note this article: “Elon Musk, World’s Richest Person, Said His Business”We are Charitable work.”)

This pattern appears to hold beyond the scope of the pledge. Total U.S. charitable giving reached a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has declined for five straight years, down 4.5% in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford University Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of families donated in 2000; Nearly half do so now, and data from Bank of America and the Lilly Family School shows that even wealthy families’ giving has fallen from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.

This pattern appears in the index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropologie. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them humanitarians associated with effective altruism, would pledge to give away the bulk of their wealth. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their stock to charities, and some of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most haven’t put philanthropy in their plans at all; They focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “This is what I see as more than just wanting to be a humanitarian,” he told the outlet.

Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving now conflicts with attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters this year will decide to impose a one-time 5% wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have moved their primary residences to South Florida to be on the safe side.

OpenAI is said to be considering going public in 2027, and ironically one reason among others may be that the tax, if passed, would calculate net worth based on an individual’s global assets as of the end of that calendar year.

Predictably, there is a lot of opposition to any kind of wealth redistribution measure of this magnitude, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom, and by economists who point out that many industrialized nations have eliminated similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy populations fall.

Other options on the table are equally controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea framed by CEO Sam Altman as sharing the positive side of AI with the public, and critics instead see as a way to buy political cover in Washington. Either way, Silicon Valley has never been keen on putting Uncle Sam at the cap table. Veteran investor Roelof Botha joked during a separate interview with this editor last year: “[Some] One of the most dangerous words in the world is: I am from the government, and I am here to help.

Against this background, it is useful to think about how much wealth is being accumulated outside of these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that number. It’s an almost unfathomable amount that outlets took out illustrations to help people understand it. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its rankings for 2026 alone, with a combined value of $2.9 trillion, before Anthropic or OpenAI went public.

In the same Business Insider story about Anthropic’s employees, it notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPO, their combined employees will own enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.

He – she feel It is unprecedented, but whether it represents a historical extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth owned by the richest 1% of American households was 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record high since the Fed began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile combined combined.

This is still less than the 45% imposed by the top 1% as the Gilded Age came to a close. But narrow the lens all the way up, and the image flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were combined to equal 4% of the United States’ gross domestic product. Today, the same segment of the population – now 19 households instead of four – is worth 14%.

Remer’s two paths, voluntary or coercive, have precedent since the last time the concentration of American wealth 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 to be distributed for the greater good during his life, calling it a shame to die rich. This essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual predecessor of the Giving Pledge.

However, he did not stay the other way for long. By the mid-1930s, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana had built a national following behind a program called “Share Our Wealth,” which called for heavy taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Fearing the loss of working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt passed what the press called a “suck-the-rich tax”, raising the top marginal income tax rate to 79%. It was redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically coercive redistribution, which arrived once voluntary giving failed to adequately address the pressure accumulating under it.

None of this is new to Reimer, who has spent his career in technology. Most curious to him is the “ethical center of technology companies,” a fascination he traces back to being an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh to students, and Steve Jobs and the other Apple founders were, as he put it, “heroes” for building something he felt was truly useful to the world.

He said what bothers him now is hearing his children talk about some technology companies the way a previous generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.

Rimmer — as an investor in Anthropic and other technology companies — is a direct recipient of a windfall that he says will eventually need to be shared, giving him more power, not less. He would rather see his fellow recipients choose to return some of the money rather than take it from them. There is an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimmer is betting that people will choose the easy way before history chooses it for them.