Index Ventures co-founder Neil Rimer says AI wealth will be redistributed 'voluntarily or involuntarily,' and the data suggests the voluntary path is already failing

In 1889, industrialist Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that the wealthy should treat their fortunes as trusts, distributing surplus capital for the public good during their lifetimes, and calling it a disgrace to die rich. For a while, voluntary philanthropy carried the weight. Then the government took over, and income tax rates climbed past 90 percent.

Neil Rimer sees the same fork arriving. The co-founder of Index Ventures, a venture firm that has raised roughly $15 billion and netted about $9 billion from exits including Figma's IPO and Google's purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz last year, told TechCrunch at a tech conference in Athens that AI-generated wealth will inevitably be redistributed 1. "It'll either be voluntary or it'll be involuntary, but it'll happen," he said, adding that he hopes tech leaders take the voluntary route.

The data says that route is already closing.

The Giving Pledge, launched in 2010 by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to persuade billionaires to commit at least half their fortunes to charity, drew 113 families in its first five years. In all of 2024, four families signed. The retreat extends across income brackets: two-thirds of American households donated to charity in 2000, and roughly half do today. Even affluent households have pulled back, from 90 percent participation in 2017 to 81 percent last year 1.

While giving contracts, the wealth pile accelerates. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public 2. Elon Musk became the first person to cross $1 trillion in net worth after SpaceX went public last month 1.

Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley whose latest book is titled "We Need to Tax Billionaires," calculates that at the Gilded Age peak around 1910, America's four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4 percent of U.S. GDP 3. The concentration is triple what Carnegie saw when he wrote his essay.

The involuntary path is already taking concrete shape. California voters will decide this year on a 5 percent one-time wealth tax targeting the state's billionaires. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have moved their primary residences to South Florida. OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and one reason may be that the tax, if passed, will value assets based on net worth as of the end of this calendar year 1.

OpenAI has also discussed handing the federal government a 5 percent equity stake, a proposal CEO Sam Altman frames as sharing AI's upside with the public and critics read as political cover 1.

Rimer's own portfolio captures the contradiction. Index Ventures backed Anthropic, and a financial planner told Business Insider that most of his newly wealthy Anthropic clients were focused on angel investing or starting companies rather than building philanthropy into their plans 1.

Carnegie's voluntary model lasted roughly four decades before FDR's New Deal replaced philanthropy with forced taxation. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national movement demanding steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American 1. The structural logic is the same across eras: when voluntary giving fails to keep pace with concentration, politics fills the gap.

The difference is speed. The Gilded Age took decades to produce its fortunes. AI has minted 45 new billionaires in a single year. Carnegie's voluntary model had more participants and more runway than anything available today. The Giving Pledge's slide from 113 families to four suggests the infrastructure of voluntary giving is eroding faster than anyone can rebuild it.

Rimer said he hopes the redistribution comes voluntarily. Carnegie hoped the same thing. Within forty years, the government decided otherwise.