Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out

In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”

Coming from most people, that would sound like standard-issue populism. Coming from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last three decades, it seemed a striking thing to say in public.

Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, and these days spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He turned up to our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knitwear that mark so many of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the firm 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 Index roughly $9 billion .

Rimer has found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, which mentors entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he and his father and two brothers gave $13 million to McGill University to renovate a campus building, now the Rimer Building, and found a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges.

In the meantime, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment, to be charitable, for 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, per a New York Times report in March that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech. (Noted that piece: “Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses ‘ are philanthropy.’”)

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, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; roughly half do now, and Bank of America and Lilly Family School data shows even affluent-household giving has slipped, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year .