Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out
Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out
尼尔·里默（Neil Rimer）认为人工智能领域的财富将会回流
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.” 五月下旬，在雅典的一次访谈中，尼尔·里默（Neil Rimer）说的一番话让我久久不能平静。在当地一场充满活力的科技节上，谈及人工智能领域不断堆积的财富时，他表示自己“强烈感觉到将会出现某种形式的财富再分配”。
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. 他继续说道：“这种再分配要么是自愿的，要么是被迫的，但它终将发生，我希望是自愿的。”他补充说，他认为科技领袖们“可以在推动这一进程中发挥主导作用”。如果这话出自常人之口，听起来就像是标准的民粹主义言论。但出自里默——过去三十年最成功的风险投资机构之一 Index Ventures 的联合创始人——之口，在公开场合说出这番话显得格外引人注目。
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. 里默于 2021 年退出了日常投资工作，如今大部分时间都待在雅典，那是他妻子的故乡，也是他孩子们珍视自己希腊护照的地方。他穿着一件皱巴巴的衬衫和牛仔裤出现在我们的采访中，而不是像他的许多同行那样穿着四分之一拉链衫和精致的针织衫。
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. 然而，Index 近年的回报率表现卓越：自成立以来，该公司已从外部投资者处筹集了约 150 亿美元，而去年的退出项目——包括 Figma 的首次公开募股（IPO）以及谷歌对网络安全公司 Wiz 的收购——据报道为 Index 带来了约 90 亿美元的收益。
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. 里默也找到了回馈社会的方式。他是 Endeavor Greece 的董事会成员，该组织致力于指导新兴市场的企业家；他还曾在 2019 年至 2025 年间担任人权观察组织（Human Rights Watch）的董事会主席。2021 年底，他和父亲及两个兄弟向麦吉尔大学捐赠了 1300 万美元，用于翻修一栋校园建筑（现为“里默大楼”），并成立了一个新的原住民研究与知识研究所。
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.’”) 与此同时，他关于财富再分配的言论出现在一个对慈善事业而言颇为尴尬的时刻。由沃伦·巴菲特和比尔·盖茨于 2010 年发起的“捐赠誓言”（Giving Pledge）——旨在让亿万富翁承诺将一半财富捐给慈善机构——正变得越来越无关紧要。据《纽约时报》三月份的一篇报道显示，该誓言在最初五年有 113 个家庭签署，随后是 72 个，再是 43 个，而 2024 年全年仅有 4 个家庭签署。这凸显了慈善事业在一些科技界巨富中已变得多么不合时宜。（该报道指出：“世界首富埃隆·马斯克曾表示，他的企业本身就是‘慈善事业’。”）
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. 这种趋势似乎不仅限于“捐赠誓言”。据《斯坦福社会创新评论》显示，2024 年美国慈善捐赠总额达到创纪录的 5925 亿美元，但实际参与捐赠的美国人数量已连续五年下降，仅 2024 年就下降了 4.5%。2000 年时，三分之二的家庭会进行捐赠；而现在这一比例约为一半。美国银行和礼来家族慈善学院的数据显示，即使是富裕家庭的捐赠比例也出现了下滑，从 2017 年的 90% 降至去年的 81%。
The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, which includes 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. 这种模式也出现在 Index 自己的投资组合中，其中包括 Anthropic 公司。《商业内幕》（Business Insider）最近询问理财规划师亚历克斯·卡斯韦尔（Alex Caswell），他的那些新晋富豪客户（其中许多是与“有效利他主义”相关的 Anthropic 员工）是否承诺捐出大部分财富。他告诉 BI，Anthropic 会匹配员工最高达其股权 25% 的慈善捐款，虽然他的一些客户利用了这一政策，但大多数人根本没有将慈善纳入计划；他们更专注于天使投资或创办自己的公司。“我看到更多的是这些，而不是成为慈善家的愿望，”他告诉该媒体。
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创始人 Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida to be on the safe side. OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason among others 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. 不出所料，自愿捐赠的缺失现在正遭遇通过立法来强制实现结果的尝试。加州选民今年将决定是否征收一项针对该州亿万富翁的 5% 一次性财富税。包括谷歌创始人谢尔盖·布林（Sergey Brin）和拉里·佩奇（Larry Page）在内的一些人，为了保险起见，已经将主要住所迁至南佛罗里达州。据报道，OpenAI 正在考虑于 2027 年上市，而愤世嫉俗地看，原因之一可能是如果该税法通过，其净资产计算将基于个人在本历年年底的全球资产。
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 who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents skedaddle. 不出所料，对于任何此类规模的财富再分配措施，都存在大量反对声音，包括加州州长加文·纽森（Gavin Newsom），以及指出许多工业化国家在看到富人纷纷逃离后，自 1990 年以来已废除类似财富税的经济学家们。
Other options on the table are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, 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 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.’” 摆在桌面上的其他选项同样充满争议。据报道，OpenAI 曾讨论过向联邦政府提供 5% 的股权，首席执行官萨姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）将此构想描述为与公众分享人工智能的红利，而批评者则认为这是一种在华盛顿购买政治保护伞的手段。无论哪种情况，硅谷从未热衷于让“山姆大叔”出现在股权结构表中。资深投资人罗洛夫·博塔（Roelof Botha）去年在与本编辑的另一次访谈中开玩笑说：“世界上最危险的话之一就是：‘我是政府派来的，我是来帮忙的。’”
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 to help people understand it. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined $2.9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. 在此背景下，值得深思的是，在这些机制之外究竟积累了多少财富。在 SpaceX 上个月 IPO 后，马斯克的个人财富刚刚超过 1 万亿美元，使他成为首位达到这一里程碑的人。这个数字几乎令人难以想象，以至于媒体不得不借助图示来帮助人们理解。《福布斯》仅在 2026 年的排名中就统计出了 45 位新的人工智能亿万富翁，总身价达 2.9 万亿美元，而这还是在 Anthropic 或 OpenAI 上市之前的数据。
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% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what t 在《商业内幕》关于 Anthropic 员工的那篇报道中提到，一旦 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 完成 IPO，其员工持有的总财富将足以买下旧金山大都会区近三分之一的住房。这感觉前所未有，但它是否代表了历史性的极端，仍存在争议。去年第三季度，美国最富有的 1% 家庭持有的财富份额达到了 31.7%，这是自美联储 1989 年开始追踪该数据以来的最高纪录，大致相当于……