The Neil Rimer wealth redistribution question is getting harder to dodge. Speaking in Athens in late May, the Index Ventures co-founder told an interviewer he has ‘a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution,’ adding: ‘It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary.’
Coming from a man who has spent the better part of three decades turning venture bets into some of the industry’s most spectacular returns, it landed differently than the usual conference-stage hand-wringing.
Index’s Returns Make the Redistribution Argument Hard to Dismiss
Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, but Index’s recent fundraise tells you where the firm sits in the food chain. In July 2024 the firm closed $2.3 billion in new capital: an $800 million twelfth venture fund and a $1.5 billion seventh growth fund, bringing total capital raised since founding to $15 billion. Across its history, 108 Index-backed companies have reached a valuation of $1 billion or more, and 57 have gone public.
Last year’s exits were a particular windfall. The snippet puts Index’s take from Figma’s IPO and Google’s acquisition of cybersecurity firm Wiz at roughly $9 billion. The Wall Street Journal, using a different calculation, puts the combined figure closer to $11 billion, with Index’s Wiz stake alone worth approximately $4.3 billion should that deal close. The exact arithmetic depends on timing and structure, but the direction of travel is unambiguous.
Figma, for its part, priced its IPO at $33.00 per share, with 36,937,080 Class A shares offered and trading expected to begin on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FIG on 31 July 2025.
Neil Rimer Wealth Redistribution Warnings Land as Giving Stalls
The problem with Rimer’s preferred ‘voluntary’ path is that the data suggests it is already losing. The Giving Pledge, the commitment Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to give away at least half their fortunes, signed up 113 families in its first five years. Then 72. Then 43. Then just four in all of 2024, per a New York Times report in March.
Total American charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, but the Stanford Social Innovation Review reports 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, according to Bank of America and Lilly Family School data.
Index’s own portfolio captures the tension neatly. Anthropic, one of its holdings, matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity. Yet financial planner Alex Caswell, speaking to Business Insider about his newly wealthy Anthropic-linked clients, said most weren’t building philanthropy into their plans at all. ‘That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,’ he told the outlet. Angel investing and starting new companies were the priorities.
With voluntary redistribution stalling, legislative alternatives are multiplying. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax targeting the state’s billionaires. Some potential targets, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have reportedly already moved their primary residences to South Florida. OpenAI is said to be considering going public in 2027, and one factor in the timing is that the California tax, if passed, would calculate net worth based on worldwide assets at the end of this calendar year.
Then there is OpenAI’s reported discussion about handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, framed by CEO Sam Altman as sharing AI’s upside with the public. Critics read it as political cover-buying. Veteran investor Roelof Botha, speaking separately to the same interviewer, put the Valley’s instinct plainly: ‘Some of the most dangerous words in the world are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”‘
The scale of what is at stake makes the debate feel newly urgent. Elon Musk crossed the $1 trillion net-worth mark after SpaceX’s IPO last month. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, which track U.S. household wealth quarterly from 1989 onwards, show the top 1% holding 31.7% of all wealth in the third quarter of last year, a record since tracking began. That still falls short of the 45% the top 1% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. Narrow the lens further, though, and economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that America’s largest fortunes, representing 19 households today versus four in 1910, now account for 14% of U.S. GDP, up from 4% at the Gilded Age peak.
Rimer knows the historical precedent. Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 ‘Gospel of Wealth’ argued a rich man should distribute his fortune within his own lifetime. It became the intellectual template for the Giving Pledge. It also did not hold off the alternative for long: by the mid-1930s Franklin Roosevelt had pushed through a top marginal income tax rate of 79%, partly to head off Huey Long’s even more aggressive ‘Share Our Wealth’ programme.
Rimer is betting his fellow beneficiaries choose Carnegie’s path before history chooses Roosevelt’s for them. Given where the Giving Pledge’s annual sign-up numbers have landed, that bet carries some clear downside risk.
