Neil Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures backer of Anthropic, told a tech festival audience in Athens in late May that AI's accumulating fortunes will face redistribution. "It'll either be voluntary or it'll be involuntary, but it'll happen, and I hope it's voluntary," he said, adding that tech leaders "can play a leading role in seeing that through." Index has raised roughly $15 billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year's exits — including Figma's IPO and Google's purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz — reportedly netted the firm around $9 billion.
The remark carries weight because Rimer is one of the direct beneficiaries of the windfall he's describing. He stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021 and now splits time between Athens and philanthropic work, including a $13 million gift he and his family made to McGill University in late 2021 and a six-year stint chairing Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025.
The context for Rimer's comment is a collapse in top-end philanthropy at exactly the moment AI fortunes are compounding. The Giving Pledge, launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in 2010, drew 113 family signatures in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024, per New York Times reporting in March. Elon Musk, whose net worth crossed $1 trillion after SpaceX's IPO last month, has said his businesses "are philanthropy."
Key facts
- 01Index Ventures has raised roughly $15B from outside investors since founding, with Figma's IPO and Google's Wiz purchase netting about $9B last year.
- 02The Giving Pledge collected 113 family signatures in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024.
- 03Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, before Anthropic or OpenAI have gone public.
- 04Elon Musk is worth just over $1 trillion after SpaceX's IPO, and OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake.
- 05California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax that calculates net worth on worldwide assets as of year-end.
The retreat isn't limited to billionaires. 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, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; roughly half do now. Bank of America and Lilly Family School data shows affluent-household giving slipped from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
Anthropic offers a case study in real time. The company matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity, an unusually generous program. Yet financial planner Alex Caswell told Business Insider that most of his newly wealthy Anthropic clients — many with effective altruism backgrounds — weren't building philanthropy into their financial plans. They were focused on angel investing and starting their own companies instead.
The scale of what's outside these voluntary mechanisms is hard to overstate. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that's before Anthropic or OpenAI have gone public. Once both complete their IPOs, their employees alone will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area, per Business Insider.
With voluntary giving falling, the involuntary path is now on the ballot. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax targeting the state's billionaires, calculated on worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have already moved their primary residences to South Florida. OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and the tax's year-end valuation trigger may factor into that timing. OpenAI has separately discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea CEO Sam Altman frames as sharing AI's upside with the public and critics read as buying political cover in Washington.
Silicon Valley's traditional resistance to any such arrangement is well-established. Sequoia's Roelof Botha put it plainly in 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.'" Governor Gavin Newsom opposes the California wealth tax, and economists note that many industrialized countries have repealed similar taxes since 1990 after watching wealthy residents relocate.
Whether today's concentration is a historic extreme depends on where you look. The top 1% of U.S. households held 31.7% of wealth in Q3 last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989 — but still below the 45% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. Narrow the lens further and the picture flips: around 1910, America's four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of GDP; today, the 19 largest households are worth 14%.
History suggests both of Rimer's paths have precedent. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie's essay "The Gospel of Wealth" argued a rich man should treat his fortune as a trust distributed within his lifetime — the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge. It didn't hold. By the mid-1930s, Huey Long's Share Our Wealth movement pressured Franklin Roosevelt into what the press called a "soak-the-rich tax," raising the top marginal income rate as high as 79%.
Rimer, a Stanford undergrad in 1984 when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students, said what troubles him is hearing his children talk about tech companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers. He would rather peers give voluntarily than have it taken from them.
For AI investors and operators, Rimer's framing is the one worth taking seriously because it's coming from inside the tent. The California vote, the OpenAI-equity-to-government proposal, and the collapsing Giving Pledge numbers are not disconnected events — they're three data points on the same curve. Companies with pre-IPO windfalls approaching should treat wealth-transfer policy as a live variable in their planning, not a distant political abstraction. The last time American fortunes reached this concentration, the settlement arrived within a generation, and it wasn't the one the wealthy drafted.
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