在五月下旬，我在雅典与尼尔·里默（Neil Rimer）坐下来交谈时，他说了一句话让我久久无法忘怀。在这个城市一个充满活力的新科技节：https://www.panathenea.org/ 上，他谈到围绕人工智能积累的财富时，他说他“强烈感觉会有某种形式的再分配。”他接着说：“这要么是自愿的，要么是非自愿的，但它会发生，我希望它是自愿的。”他告诉我，并补充说，他认为科技领袖“可以在推进这一进程中发挥领导作用。”
如果是大多数人说这话，会听起来像典型的民粹主义。然而，出自里默之口——他是过去三十年最成功的风投公司之一Index Ventures的联合创始人——在公开场合说这句话似乎令人瞩目。
里默在2021年退出了日常投资事务，如今大部分时间都在雅典度过，那是他妻子的家乡，也是他孩子们珍视希腊护照的地方。他参加我们的采访时，穿着一件皱巴巴的衬衫和牛仔裤，而非像许多同龄人那样的四分之一拉链衫和精致针织衫。然而，近年来Index的回报非常突出：自公司成立以来，Index从外部投资者筹集了大约150亿美元，据报道去年的退出事件，包括Figma的首次公开募股和谷歌收购网络安全公司Wiz，使Index净赚约90亿美元：https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-08/index-ventures-looks-to-next-generation-after-bumper-vc-year。
里默找到了回馈社会的方式。他担任Endeavor Greece的董事会成员，该组织指导新兴市场的创业者，并从2019年到2025年担任人权观察（Human Rights Watch）董事会主席。2021年底，他和他的父亲及两位兄弟向麦吉尔大学捐赠了1300万美元，用于翻新一座校园建筑，该建筑现名为里默楼，并成立了新的土著研究与知识研究所。
与此同时，他关于再分配的评论在捐赠问题上显得时机有些奇怪，姑且不论慷慨。‘捐赠承诺’是沃伦·巴菲特和比尔·盖茨在2010年发起的承诺，旨在让亿万富翁承诺将其一半的财富捐给慈善事业，但它正变得越来越不相关。据《纽约时报》3月的一篇报道，最初五年内有113个家庭签署，然后是72个，再然后是43个，而到了2024年仅有四个家庭签署：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/business/the-billionaire-backlash-against-a-philanthropic-dream.html，这凸显了慈善在一些科技界最富有的人群中已变得过时。（报道中指出：“全球最富有的人埃隆·马斯克曾表示，他的企业‘就是慈善事业。’”）
这一模式似乎不仅限于捐赠承诺。2024年，美国的慈善捐赠总额达到创纪录的5925亿美元，但实际上捐赠的美国人数量已经连续五年下降：https://ssir.org/articles/entry/grassroots-giving-collapse-social-innovation-threat，仅2024年这一数字就下降了4.5%，据《斯坦福社会创新评论》称。2000年约有三分之二的家庭进行捐赠；现在大约只有一半捐赠，且美国银行和莉莉家庭学院的数据表明，即使是富裕家庭的捐赠也有所减少，从2017年的90%降至去年的81%：https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/what-hard-data-do-we-have-about-the-billionaire-giving-boom。
这一模式在Index本身的投资组合中也有所体现，包括Anthropic：https://www.indexventures.com/companies/anthropic/。《商业内幕》最近询问了一位理财规划师亚历克斯·卡斯韦尔，他的新富裕客户中，许多人是与有效利他主义相关的Anthropic员工，是否承诺将大部分财富捐出。Anthropic会匹配员工最多25%股权捐款用于慈善，他告诉BI，他的一些客户确实利用了这一机制，但大多数人根本没有将慈善纳入计划；他们更关注天使投资或创办自己的公司。他告诉该媒体：https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-billionaires-anthropic-openai-wealth-gap-2026-7，“我看到的更多是这种情况，而不是想成为慈善家的愿望。”
毫不奇怪，自愿捐赠的缺失现在正面临通过立法结果来弥补的尝试。今年，加利福尼亚州选民将决定是否对该州的亿万富翁征收一次性5%的财富税。一些人，包括谷歌创始人谢尔盖·布林和拉里·佩奇，已经将他们的主要居住地迁往南佛罗里达：https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/8-billionaires-fled-california-wealth-143341289.html，以确保安全。
据报道，OpenAI正在考虑在2027年上市：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/technology/openai-ipo-artificial-intelligence.html，而功利地说，其原因之一可能是如果该税通过，将会根据个人截至本日历年末的全球资产计算净值：https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-stock-drops-new-low-ipo-price-starship-launch-scrubbed-2026-7。
正如预期的那样，任何规模的财富再分配措施都面临大量反对，包括加文·纽瑟姆州长的反对，也包括经济学家的反对：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/opinion/california-wealth-tax-france.html，他们指出，自1990年以来，许多工业化国家在看到富裕居民逃离后取消了类似的财富税。
桌面上的其他选项同样具有争议。据报道，OpenAI曾讨论向联邦政府提供5%的股权：https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/02/openai-proposes-us-government-own-5percent-stake-to-address-political-blowback.html，这一想法由CEO山姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）表述为与公众分享人工智能的收益，而批评者则认为这是为了在华盛顿谋求政治庇护。无论哪种情况，硅谷从未热衷于把美国政府放进股东名单上。资深投资人Roelof Botha在去年与该编辑的一次单独访谈中开玩笑说：https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/02/sequoias-roelof-botha-warns-founders-about-chasing-sky-high-valuations-as-the-firm-doubles-down-on-its-selective-approach/：“世界上最危险的话之一就是：‘我是政府来的，我是来帮忙的。’”
在这种背景下，值得思考的是，有多少财富正在积累在这些机制之外。马斯克的净资产略高于1万亿美元，在SpaceX上个月的首次公开募股之后，他成为首位达到这一标志的人。这几乎是如此难以想象的金额，以至于媒体不得不通过插图来帮助人们理解：https://www.wsj.com/business/trillions-game-spacex-first-trillionaire-elon-musk-75cfbf1b。福布斯在其2026年的排行榜中统计了45位新的AI亿万富翁：https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/03/10/meet-the-45-ai-newcomers-to-forbes-2026-billionaires-list/，总价值为2.9万亿美元，而且这还是在Anthropic或OpenAI上市之前的情况。
在同一篇关于Anthropic员工的Business Insider报道中指出，一旦Anthropic和OpenAI完成首次公开募股，它们的员工所持有的财富将足以购买旧金山都会区近三分之一的所有住房。
这感觉前所未有，但它是否代表历史性的极端仍有一些争议。去年第三季度，美国顶层1%家庭持有的财富占比达到31.7%：https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134，这是自美联储自1989年开始追踪数据以来的最高纪录，并且大致等于剩余90%家庭总和所持有的财富。
这仍低于镀金时代接近尾声时顶层1%所掌握的45%。但如果把视角缩小到最顶层，情况就完全不同。著名经济学家加布里埃尔·祖克曼计算出，在镀金时代的高峰期，大约1910年，美国四大最富有家庭的财富总和占美国GDP的4%。今天，这同样的人群——现在是19户家庭：https://gzucman.substack.com/p/the-era-of-trillionaires-will-be-dire-for-democracy，而不是四户——则价值占GDP的14%.
赖默提出的两条路径——自愿或强制——在美国财富集中达到这一水平上已有先例。1889年，在第一次镀金时代的顶峰，安德鲁·卡内基发表了一篇文章，主张富人应将自己的财富视为信托，在有生之年用于公共利益，他称“富而死是耻辱”。这篇名为《财富福音》的文章（https://carnegie.org/publication/the-gospel-of-wealth/）成为现代慈善事业的奠基文献，也成为“捐赠誓言”的思想先导。
然而，这并没有长时间阻挡另一条道路。到1930年代中期，路易斯安那州参议员休伊·朗在全国范围内建立了追随者基础，推动一项名为“共享我们的财富”的计划（https://web.mit.edu/course/21/21h.102/www/Primary source collections/The New Deal/Long, Share Our Wealth.htm），要求对富人征收高额税款以资助保障每个美国人的收入。担心失去工人阶级对朗的支持，富兰克林·罗斯福推动通过了媒体称之为“榨取富人税”的法案，将最高边际所得税率提高至79%。虽然重新分配的规模不及朗所希望的，但它仍然是美国历史上最清晰的例子，显示在自愿捐赠未能充分应对底层压力时，政治强制性再分配随之而来。
这一切对赖默来说并不新鲜，他的职业生涯都在科技领域。对他来说更有趣的是“科技公司的道德核心”，他将这种迷恋追溯到1984年斯坦福大学本科时期，当时苹果为学生提供首款麦金塔打折，乔布斯和苹果的其他创始人在他看来是因创造了真正对世界有益的东西而成为“英雄”。
他说，如今让他困扰的是，听到自己的孩子谈论某些科技公司时，方式就像前一代人谈论国防承包商或香烟制造商那样。
作为Anthropic和其他科技公司的投资者，Rimer是他所说的最终需要分享的意外之财的直接受益者，这赋予了他更多的权威，而不是更少。他宁愿看到其他受益者选择归还部分资金，而不是被迫拿走。有一种简单的办法，也有一种困难的办法，而Rimer押注于人们会先选择简单的方式，而不是让历史替他们做决定。
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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：https://www.panathenea.org/ 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：https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-08/index-ventures-looks-to-next-generation-after-bumper-vc-year.
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：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/business/the-billionaire-backlash-against-a-philanthropic-dream.html 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：https://ssir.org/articles/entry/grassroots-giving-collapse-social-innovation-threat, 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：https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/what-hard-data-do-we-have-about-the-billionaire-giving-boom.
The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, which includes Anthropic：https://www.indexventures.com/companies/anthropic/. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism, were pledging to give away the bulk of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity, and some of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most weren’t building philanthropy into their plans at all; they were focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,” he told the outlet：https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-billionaires-anthropic-openai-wealth-gap-2026-7.
Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving is now running up against attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax that targets the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida：https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/8-billionaires-fled-california-wealth-143341289.html to be on the safe side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/technology/openai-ipo-artificial-intelligence.html, and cynically, one reason among others：https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-stock-drops-new-low-ipo-price-starship-launch-scrubbed-2026-7 may be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.
As expectedly, there is plenty of opposition to any kind of wealth-redistribution measure of this scale, including by Governor Gavin Newsom, and including by economists：https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/opinion/california-wealth-tax-france.html who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents skedaddle.
Other options on the table are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake：https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/02/openai-proposes-us-government-own-5percent-stake-to-address-political-blowback.html, an idea CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing AI’s upside with the public, and critics see instead as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam on the cap table. Joked veteran investor Roelof Botha during a separate sit-down：https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/02/sequoias-roelof-botha-warns-founders-about-chasing-sky-high-valuations-as-the-firm-doubles-down-on-its-selective-approach/ with this editor last year: “[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Against this backdrop, it’s worth thinking through how much wealth is amassing outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over $1 trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. It’s nearly so unfathomable an amount that outlets have taken to illustrations：https://www.wsj.com/business/trillions-game-spacex-first-trillionaire-elon-musk-75cfbf1b to help people understand it. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires：https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/03/10/meet-the-45-ai-newcomers-to-forbes-2026-billionaires-list/ in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public.
In that same Business Insider story about Anthropic employees, it notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.
It feels unprecedented, but whether it represents an historic extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households hit 31.7%：https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134 in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.
That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded as the Gilded Age was nearing its end. But narrow the lens to the tippy top, and the picture flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, that same sliver of the population — now 19 households：https://gzucman.substack.com/p/the-era-of-trillionaires-will-be-dire-for-democracy instead of four — is worth 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have precedent from the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the peak of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a rich man should treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the public good within his own lifetime, calling it a disgrace to die wealthy. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth：https://carnegie.org/publication/the-gospel-of-wealth/,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
It didn’t hold off the other path for long, though. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share Our Wealth：https://web.mit.edu/course/21/21h.102/www/Primary%20source%20collections/The%20New%20Deal/Long%2C%20Share%20Our%20Wealth.htm, demanding steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate as high as 79%. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution arriving once voluntary giving failed to adequately address the pressure building underneath it.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in tech. What’s more curious to him is “the moral center of tech companies,” a fascination he traced to being a Stanford undergrad in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and Apple’s other founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was genuinely good for the world.
What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.
That Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct recipient of the windfall he says will eventually need to be shared gives him more authority, not less. He’d rather see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give some of the money back than have it taken from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is betting on people picking the easy one before history picks it for them.
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Amid hardware legal battle, OpenAI releases a $230 keyboard for Codex：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/amid-hardware-legal-battle-openai-releases-a-230-keyboard-for-codex/ Lucas Ropek：https://techcrunch.com/author/lucas-ropek/
OpenAI’s first hardware device is reportedly a screenless speaker that can move：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/openais-first-hardware-device-is-reportedly-a-screenless-speaker-that-can-move/ Lucas Ropek：https://techcrunch.com/author/lucas-ropek/
Anthropic’s newest ad is creeping people out：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/anthropics-newest-ad-is-creeping-people-out/ Lucas Ropek：https://techcrunch.com/author/lucas-ropek/
Satya Nadella has issued a shocking warning to companies using AI：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/satya-nadella-has-issued-a-shocking-warning-to-companies-using-ai/ Julie Bort：https://techcrunch.com/author/julie-bort/
The wildest allegations in Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/the-wildest-allegations-in-apples-trade-secrets-lawsuit-against-openai/ Sarah Perez：https://techcrunch.com/author/sarah-perez/
Anthropic starts localizing Claude pricing for India, its biggest market after the US：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/anthropic-starts-localizing-claude-pricing-for-india-its-biggest-market-after-the-us/ Jagmeet Singh：https://techcrunch.com/author/jagmeet-singh/
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