The Wealth Question: Neil Rimer on AI Money, Redistribution, and the Choice Ahead

A venture capitalist who co founded one of the most successful firms of the last three decades says something striking. He believes the enormous wealth being generated by artificial intelligence will eventually be redistributed. The only question is whether it will happen voluntarily or involuntarily.

Neil Rimer, a co founder of Index Ventures, made this observation during a conversation in Athens. He hopes the redistribution will be voluntary. He thinks tech leaders can play a leading role in making that happen.

This is not standard populist rhetoric. This is a man whose firm has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors and whose recent exits, including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of Wiz, reportedly netted Index roughly $9 billion. When someone with that track record talks about wealth concentration, it is worth paying attention.

The Philanthropy Paradox

Rimer’s comments come at an odd moment for charitable giving. The Giving Pledge, the promise Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to commit half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024.

The pattern appears to hold beyond the Pledge. Total American charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has fallen for five straight years, down 4.5% in 2024 alone. Two thirds of households donated in 2000. Roughly half do now. Even affluent household giving has slipped from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.

The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropic. A financial planner recently noted that his newly wealthy clients, many of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism, were not building philanthropy into their plans. They were focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. Most were not using Anthropic’s matching program, which allows employees to donate up to 25% of their equity to charity.

The Legislative Alternative

The absence of voluntary giving is now running up against attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one time wealth tax that targets 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 reportedly considering going public in 2027. Cynically, one reason among others may be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.

There is plenty of opposition to any kind of wealth redistribution measure of this scale, including by Governor Gavin Newsom, and including by economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents leave.

Other options are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake. CEO Sam Altman has framed this as sharing AI’s upside with the public. Critics see it instead as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put the government on the cap table.

The Scale of the Wealth

It is worth thinking through 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. That is before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public.

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.

The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households hit 31.7% in the third quarter of last year. That is a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.

That is 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 flips. At the height of the Gilded Age, 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%.

Historical Precedent

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. He called 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.

It did not hold off the other path for long. By the mid 1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called 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 adequately address the pressure building underneath it.

The Moral Center of Tech

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

What troubles him now 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 would rather see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give some of the money back than have it taken from them. There is an easy way to do this and a hard way. Rimer is betting on people picking the easy one before history picks it for them.

The Choice Ahead

The AI industry is creating wealth at an unprecedented scale. That wealth is concentrating in fewer hands than at any time since the Gilded Age. The question is not whether some redistribution will occur. The question is whether it will come from the generosity of those who have benefited or through the force of law when public pressure becomes unbearable.

Rimer’s warning is clear. The tech industry has a choice. It can lead the way in sharing the fruits of its innovations, or it can wait until the public demands a share through other means. One path preserves autonomy and reputation. The other invites intervention and resentment.

The money is coming back out. The only question is how.

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