Neil Rimer dropped a bombshell on me in Athens last May. We were at a new tech festival, watching the money pile up around artificial intelligence like a tidal wave. He leaned in. His eyes locked on mine. He said he had “a strong sense that there will be something happen regarding wealth redistribution.”
Voluntary, he hoped.
But he knew it could be involuntary too. Tech leaders must lead, he insisted. Or face the wrath of history.
Most people spout this stuff and disappear into a spin cycle of populism. Rimer? He co-founded Index Ventures. This isn’t a grift. This is from a guy whose firm recently netted roughly $9 billion in one year. Just from exits. Figma’s IPO. The Google buyout of Wiz. It was real.
Rimer lives in Greece now. He’s got family there. Greek passports. He showed up to our chat in a wrinkled button-down and jeans. Not the usual tech uniform of quarter-zips. He’d stepped back from active investing in 2021. He’s busy with Endeavor Greece now. Mentoring founders in emerging markets. He chaired Human Rights Watch until recently. His family donated $13 million to build the Rimer Institute at McGill University.
He’s trying to do the right thing. But the game is changing.
The giving trend is breaking
Look at the big promises. The Giving Pledge started back in 2010. Buffett. Gates. It was the big idea. Get billionaires to give half their net worth away. Sounds noble, right?
Now look closer. It’s losing steam. Sign-ups peaked in those first five years with 113 families. Then 72. Then 43. In all of 2024? Just four new signatures. Four. The New York Times flagged this. It seems out of fashion now among the tech elite. Even Elon Musk doesn’t do the pledge. His line? His business is philanthropy.
It’s not just billionaires. The trend is rotting at the roots. Americans donated a record $592 billion in 2022, but by 2024 the number of people giving had fallen for five straight years. Stanford data shows a 4.5% drop in 2024 alone. Two-thirds of US households gave to charity in 2000. Now? Half. Even the wealthy are pulling back. 90% were donating in 2017. 81% did it in 2023.
What’s happening inside the AI bubble itself?
Business Insider talked to financial planners watching this wave. Many employees at firms like Anthropic are suddenly sitting on equity worth millions. Some get their companies to match up to 25% into charity. But that’s a drop in the bucket for most. Most of them? They aren’t pledging billions. They are angel investing. Starting startups. Building the next engine of wealth. Philanthropy is not the goal. Power is.
Forced redistribution looms large
When voluntary giving dries up, governments step in.
California is voting on a wealth tax soon. A 5% lump-sum hit on billionaires. It’s brutal. If you’re rich and smart, you don’t stay in California forever. Sergey Brin. Larry Page. Both Google co-founders. They moved their primary residences to Florida. Why? South Florida has no state income tax. They’re hedging against the inevitable.
OpenAI is looking to go public. Reportedly by 2027. One reason might be tax optimization. If California’s tax passes, your net worth is calculated at year-end. Go public, sell shares, move cash assets… there are ways to game it. But you need to leave before the net hits.
Everyone is fighting this. Governor Gavin Newsom hates wealth taxes. Economists warn them off too. History says these taxes just make rich people flee. Other countries repealed similar taxes back in the 1990s. People ran away.
Then there are the political plays. OpenAI supposedly talked to the federal government. Offering them a 5% equity stake. Sam Altman calls it sharing AI upside. Critics call it buying protection from regulators in D.C. Silicon Valley has never wanted Uncle Sam in the boardroom.
Some of the most dangerous words are: “I’m from the government. And I’m here to help.” — Roelof Botha, veteran investor.
How big does this pile actually get?
Let’s talk scale. Musk crossed one trillion dollars recently after the SpaceX IPO. A trillion. It’s hard to picture. We use illustrations. Charts. Still doesn’t quite work.
The wealth concentration is unprecedented.
Fortunes in AI are multiplying faster than we can name them. Forbes found 45 new billionaires in the space just in its 2026 update. $2.9 trillion combined. Anthropic? OpenAI? Neither is public yet. They could double this overnight.
Just wait. When those IPOs finally hit? The combined wealth of Anthropic and OpenAI employees will buy nearly one-third of all homes in the San Jose-San Francisco area. Think about that. You couldn’t buy those homes with gold bars alone. Not without melting down all the bars in Fort Knox and a few bank vaults, too.
Is it historic?
The top 1% holds 31.7% of all wealth in America right now. A record. Equal to what the bottom 90% have combined. That is a lot of power concentrated at the top. It’s high. But is it the highest it’s ever been?
No. The Gilded Age had higher percentages. The top 1% held 45%. We’re not back to the Robber Baron days yet. Not exactly.
But look at the very tip of the spear.
Gabriel Zucman, an economist who tracks this stuff closely, did the math. In 1910, the four largest families owned about 4% of the US GDP. Today? The richest nineteen households own 14%.
Three times as much wealth per household at the peak of inequality in US history. The gap isn’t just getting wider. The elite at the top are extracting value at a scale the system has never seen before.
Why does this matter to your portfolio?
You might be wondering how this redistribution works. It’s not usually just checks in the mail.
There’s precedent. 1889. Andrew Carnegie wrote The Gospel of Wealth. His idea? Rich guys should treat money like a trust. Use it now for the public good. Die poor if you have to. He wrote that dying wealthy is a disgrace. He tried to do it the hard way.
Did it save society from the wrath?
Not really. Huey Long got famous in the 30s with Share Our Wealth. He demanded massive taxes to fund guaranteed income for every family. The working class loved it. Roosevelt got scared. He panicked.
Roosevelt pushed through a tax hike to stop Long from gaining too much traction. He raised the top marginal income rate to 79%.
Did it give the wealth back? No. Not entirely. But it stopped the bleeding. It kept the social contract intact until voluntary giving actually caught up decades later. It was painful. It was forced. And it worked because there was no other option left.
That’s where we are now.
Rimer knows this. He’s watched it before. He doesn’t seem mad at the tech companies he invests in. He’s troubled.
He heard his own kids talk about big tech. Not with reverence. With suspicion. They view companies like certain defense contractors now. Or cigarette manufacturers. Profitable? Maybe. Necessary? Sure. Deserving of our blind trust? Hardly.
Rimer is sitting on his own billions from Index. He benefits from this system. Yet he’s asking his peers to pick the easy road.
Give some money back. Voluntarily. Help shape the rules before Washington steps in to do it for you. Before Huey Long 2.0 takes over the narrative. Before the mood shifts from “disgrace to die wealthy” to “illegal to hoard power.”
History doesn’t ask for permission.
It just takes what’s needed. And it never waits politely.
Will Rimer’s peers listen? Or are they heading for the exits? We’ll see where they park their fleets.
