There is no better way to elevate your living room than by elevating that big TV from a stand and onto a wall. Wall-mounting a TV may seem daunting, but if your space allows it you can reclaim precious real estate on your entertainment center and help your living area feel more open and airy. It’ll also have the benefit of keeping your precious TV out of reach from meddlesome children or rambunctious pets
All it takes are some basic tools, a bit of labor, and a buddy to help lift larger TVs. Here’s all you need to prepare yourself.
TV wall mounts are a commodity item these days, so there are all kinds of similar looking models from all kinds of brands. Amazon is awash with options and even Amazon Basics sells some.
The first things you want to look for are what size of TV a mount is rated for, and how much weight it can hold. Check the tech specs of your exact TV model, and make sure you’re well within the mount’s range.
You should also double-check the VESA sizing of your TV, and ensure the wall mount is compatible. VESA mount sizes correspond to the distance between the bolt connector holes on the rear of your TV.
Another important thing to consider is if the wall mount is fixed, simply tilts, or has full-motion articulation, allowing it to come off the wall. Fixed and basic tilt models may be simpler and a little sturdier, but I cannot stress enough how convenient it is to be able to pull the TV away from the wall on a tilt arm. It makes unplugging and plugging in any cables to the back of the TV so much easier. When I had a basic tilt mount for my old 70-inch TV, simply adjusting HDMI plugs in the back could be a two-person job, because we had to lift the TV off the wall in order to reach the ports.
When I recently mounted a new 77-inch LG C3 OLED TV, I went with this articulating model by USX. Its claimed rating — for TVs up to 86 inches and weighing 132 pounds — was more than enough to cover my TV, which weighs less than half of that at 51.8 pounds. I wasn’t familiar with USX before buying it, but I took a chance and it’s been perfectly fine. I’ve also had positive experiences with mounts and accessories from Mount-It.
You’ll typically need a drill, screwdriver, bubble level, stud finder, and a pencil. The wall mount may come with a basic screwdriver, hex key, or small wrenches — maybe even a small bubble level.
Wall mounts usually have two vertical bars that attach to the TV via its VESA screw holes, allowing the TV to hang on the bracket once it’s mounted. These bars usually have many mounting holes, to accommodate different sizes of TVs. Lay your TV down on a flat, padded surface and mount the bars to its back according to the included instructions.
Measure, measure, measure
Most wall mounts come with a paper template that shows the footprint of the mounting bracket. You’ll need to use this or the bracket itself to frame up where it will go. To pick out the ideal location to mount it on your wall, you’ll have to account for the size of your TV and how high or low it can fit on your wall. Keep in mind that you want your TV to be about eye level, though not every space can easily accommodate the ideal height. Be sure to actually sit down where you’ll be watching from and visualize where your TV should go, and try not to pull any r/TVTooHigh crimes.
Find the dimensions of the TV from its tech specs and use them to measure its ideal mounting location on the wall. You’ll then have to measure the distance between the top of the TV to where the vertical bars will hang on the bracket. That will give you an idea of how high you’ll have to mount the bracket on the wall. Mark that height on your wall with a pencil.
Now that you have an idea of where the bracket will go, grab the stud finder and map out your wall studs. Securing the bracket to a sturdy wall stud is essential when mounting heavy stuff, as drywall alone isn’t strong enough to safely carry such a load. The bracket’s horizontal location on the wall has a little leeway, since the TV doesn’t have to hang on the exact center of the bracket. You will hopefully have a wall stud that aligns with one of the bracket’s screw holes — if not, I’ll explain how to deal with that in the next section. Use the bubble level to level the bracket or its template on the wall where it should go, and mark the screw holes on the wall.
To mount the bracket to your mapped-out spot on the wall, you’ll have to drill some pilot holes for the screws. The instructions should tell you how big the pilot holes should be. The tricky part is what to do if one side of screws don’t line up with a stud.
You’ll want to use wall anchors or toggle bolts for any screws not going into studs, because mounting a TV to just Sheetrock could likely cause it to rip out of the wall and fall. To ensure my brackets could safely hold the weight of my TV, despite not lining up with wall studs, I’ve used Toggler toggle bolts. (There are plenty of other brands too, and you can easily find them at hardware stores.) The sizes of the toggle bolts or anchors you’ll need to use depend on the screws included with your bracket.
A quick aside: toggle bolts are fantastic, and I’ve used them to hang things like my TV’s soundbar and various shelves around my house that didn’t line up with wall studs. Just be aware they require drilling a bigger-than-average pilot hole, so be sure you get your measurements spot-on.
Now drill your pilot holes, put in any necessary anchors or toggle bolts, and screw the bracket to the wall.
This is actually the easiest part, provided you have a friend to help you. But it’s also one of the most stressful. Team-lift the TV up and onto the bracket. Once you hang it there’s usually a small screw or similar method to lock the bottom of the vertical TV bars to the bottom of the bracket. This extra bit of security is vital, because without it your TV is just hanging on by gravity and not fully secured. If the TV is too high or too low on the bracket, you should be able to take it off and adjust the vertical bars on its rear to get it in the perfect spot.
If you opted for a tilting or articulating mount, this is when you’ll have to tinker with it as per the included instructions to ensure the TV is level. Also, if your TV is especially big or mounted slightly above eye level, you can tilt it downwards slightly toward you.
Now enjoy that lovely TV on your wall.
One more thing: cable management
Okay, I know you’re done and all proud of yourself (you should be), but there’s an additional step you should consider to make a wall-mounted TV setup look its best: neaten up your cables.
There are a variety of ways you can do this. For example, you can use cable hiders or raceways, or cut entry and exit holes in the wall behind your TV and install a cable bridge to hide the cables completely (you’ll need some lengthy cables). Whether you opt for something simple or advanced, any cable management is better than just letting wires dangle and fall wherever they may. You’ve worked this hard to mount your TV, so why not go the extra mile and make the space look tidier?
Source link
#wallmount
![Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out | TechCrunch
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 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 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 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 2.5 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.
The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, too, 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.
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 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.
As unsurprisingly, 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.
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, but critics see it 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.’”
It’s worth thinking through how much wealth sits outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined .9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. In that same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI 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 the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.
That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. 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 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,” 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, 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.
Critics may note that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct beneficiary of the windfall he says will eventually need to be shared. But 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.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Neil #Rimer #thinks #money #coming #TechCrunch](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-17-at-9.20.56-PM.png?resize=1200%2C739&ssl=1 "Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out | TechCrunch
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 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 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 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 2.5 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.
The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, too, 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.
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 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.
As unsurprisingly, 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.
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, but critics see it 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.’”
It’s worth thinking through how much wealth sits outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined .9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. In that same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI 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 the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.
That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. 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 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,” 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, 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.
Critics may note that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct beneficiary of the windfall he says will eventually need to be shared. But 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.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Neil #Rimer #thinks #money #coming #TechCrunch")
Post Comment