Neil Rimer predicts AI investments will return

In late May, I sat down with Neil Rimer in Athens, and something he said during our conversation has lingered with me ever since. We were at a lively new tech festival in the city, discussing the enormous wealth accumulating around AI, when he remarked that he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He elaborated, saying, “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary.” He added that he believes tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”

From almost anyone else, those words might sound like run-of-the-mill populism. From Rimer, however,a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture capital firms of the past three decades,it was a striking statement to make publicly.

Rimer stepped away from day-to-day investing in 2021. He now spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children cherish their Greek passports. When we met, he wore a rumpled button-down shirt and jeans, a far cry from the quarter-zips and fine knitwear typical of many of his peers. Yet Index’s recent performance has been exceptional. Since its founding, the firm has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors. Last year alone, exits like Figma’s IPO and Google’s acquisition of Wiz reportedly netted Index approximately $9 billion.

Rimer has found ways to give back. He serves on the board of Endeavor Greece, an organization that mentors entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he, his father, and his 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 Knowledges.

Still, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment for charitable giving. The Giving Pledge, launched in 2010 by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to encourage billionaires to commit half their fortunes to charity, is losing relevance. According to a New York Times report from March, 113 families signed up in the first five years, then 72, then 43, and just four in all of 2024. The report highlighted how out-of-fashion philanthropy has become among some of the wealthiest in tech. (Notably, it stated: “Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses ‘are philanthropy.’”)

This trend extends beyond the Pledge. Total American charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually donating has fallen for five consecutive years, dropping 4.5% in 2024 alone, per the Stanford Social Innovation Review. In 2000, two-thirds of households gave; now, roughly half do. Even affluent households have reduced their giving, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year, according to data from Bank of America and the Lilly Family School.

The pattern is visible within Index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked financial planner Alex Caswell whether his newly wealthy clients,many of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism,were pledging to give away the bulk of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity. Some of Caswell’s clients have used this, he told BI, but most were not incorporating philanthropy into their plans at all. Instead, they focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,” Caswell said.

Unsurprisingly, the lack of voluntary giving is now colliding with attempts to legislate the outcome. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida to avoid it.

OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027. Cynically, one reason may be that the tax, if passed, would calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.

Equally unsurprisingly, there is strong opposition to any large-scale wealth redistribution measure. Governor Gavin Newsom is against it, and economists point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents flee.

Other options are also controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed giving the federal government a 5% equity stake. CEO Sam Altman has framed this as sharing AI’s upside with the public, but critics see it as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In any case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam on the cap table. As veteran investor Roelof Botha joked during 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.’”

It’s worth considering how much wealth sits outside these mechanisms. Elon Musk is worth just over $1 trillion after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined $2.9 trillion,and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. In that same Business Insider story, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.

This feels unprecedented, but whether it represents an historic extreme is debated. 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 tracking the data in 1989. That’s roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.

That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. But narrow the lens to the very top, and the picture shifts. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of U. S. GDP. Today, that same sliver of the population,now 19 households instead of four,is worth 14%.

Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have 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 treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the public good within his own lifetime, calling it a disgrace to die wealthy. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.

But it didn’t hold off the other path for long. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind Share Our Wealth, demanding steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate as high as 79%. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution arriving once voluntary giving failed to address the pressure building underneath it.

None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in tech. What intrigues him more is “the moral center of tech companies,” a fascination he traces back to being a Stanford undergrad in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students. Steve Jobs and Apple’s other founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was genuinely good for the world.

What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.

Critics may note that Rimer,as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies,is a direct beneficiary of the windfall he says will eventually need to be shared. But he’d rather see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give some of the money back than have it taken from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is betting on people picking the easy one before history picks it for them.