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. In new vitality Technology Festival In the city, while talking about 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 Reimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the past three decades, it seemed an amazing thing to say out loud.

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 last year’s exits include Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of cybersecurity company Wiz. The index 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 in the first five years, then 72, then 43, and then just four in 2024, according to the New York Times. Report in March This underscored how philanthropy has fallen out of fashion among some of the richest people in technology. (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 donations reach a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has declined. Five consecutive yearsdown 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 donations from wealthy families have declined, from 90% in 2017 to 90% in 2017. 81% last year.

This pattern appears in the private index portfolio as well Includes anthropy. 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 philanthropist.” 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 already moved their primary residences to South Florida To be on the safe side.

OpenAI is said to be considering this It will go public in 2027Sarcasm is one reason Among other things The tax, if passed, would probably calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.

Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of opposition to any kind of wealth redistribution measures of this magnitude, including from Governor Gavin Newsom, Economists They point out that many industrialized countries have abolished similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy populations collapse.

Other options on the table are equally controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing over to the federal government a 5% ownership stakean idea framed by CEO Sam Altman as sharing the positive side of artificial intelligence with the public, but critics see instead 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 Separate sit-in With this editor last year: “[Some of]the most dangerous words in the world are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

It is useful to think about how much wealth exists 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. Forbes counted 45 new billionaires in the field of artificial intelligence In its 2026 rankings alone, it’s worth a total of $2.9 trillion, and that’s before Anthropic or OpenAI go public. In the same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI 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 held by the top 1% of American families reached 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 90% of other households outside the top decile combined hold.

This is still less than the 45% that was the top 1% imposed at the height of the Gilded Age in 1916. But when you narrow the lens to the slanted apex, the image is inverted. 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 families Instead of four — equals 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. That article”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, Louisiana State Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share our wealthHe called for imposing heavy taxes on the rich to finance 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.

Critics may note that Remer — as an investor in Anthropic and other technology companies — is a direct beneficiary of a windfall that he says will eventually need to be shared. But he would rather see his fellow beneficiaries 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.