Why ‘Mountainhead’ misses its target Tech bros are beyond parody

Once upon a time, billionaires were boring. Warren Buffet drove a sensible car, lived in a quiet Omaha neighborhood, and made a fortune by investing in the world’s most uninteresting companies. Sam Walton was a wiry guy in a baseball cap who just happened to own Walmart, the largest retail chain on the planet. To this day, Bill Gates schleps around in a sweater, stupefyingly dull even as he sprays dust at the sun and expresses regret at all those meetings with Jeffrey Epstein.

Now, however, there is a new class of exceedingly colorful billionaire. Foremost among them is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, close friend of Donald Trump, and father of 14 (that we know of). But there are many others: Larry Ellison, the orange skinned octogenarian CEO of Oracle, creepy Mark Zuckerberg with his plan to provide everyone with 12 AI friends each, not to mention Jeff Bezos 2.0, previously a standard issue ruthless oligarch, now a man given to posing with his shirt off and launching celebrities into space.

Not so long ago, the media gushed over these exotic creatures, convinced that they were going to lead us all into a new golden age. Tony Stark was the pop culture avatar of the charismatic tech genius, solving impossible problems with his brilliant inventions. But then things went sour: Trump, social media, disinformation… By the time OpenAI launched the generative AI revolution with ChatGPT, advances in technology were met with as much apocalyptic panic as excitement. It didn’t help that Sam Altman and his fellow AI CEOs kept telling us that the technology they were developing was so dangerous that it might one day kill us all. Curiously, they kept building it.

Never before have we had so many outlandish characters among the world’s rich and powerful. And yet, despite the abundance of targets, satire that tackles the phenomenon of the 21st century tech billionaire is thin on the ground. HBO’s Silicon Valley did a fine job of sending up the quirks of VC culture, but it was content to stop there, and swerved the larger sociopolitical questions. Into this void arrives Mountainhead, a new film by Jesse Armstrong, best known as the creator of Succession — although British readers may remember him as one half of the writing team behind the cult comedy Peep Show.

On the surface, it is easy to see why Armstrong was drawn to the theme. In Succession he wove a saga of a family of vile narcissists vying for control of the media empire their aging father, a diabolical combination of Rupert Murdoch and King Lear, was unwilling to relinquish. Succession served as a vehicle through which he could explore large scale questions regarding the media, politics and the corrosive effects of power on human relationships. In Mountainhead, Armstrong applies the same approach to our new billionaire overlords. The setup is simple: four tech oligarchs are spending a weekend at a mountain retreat in Utah, part of a tradition where they kick back and enjoy simple pleasures like burgers and beer, with no business talk.

Ven, played by Cory Michael Smith, owns a social media app called Traan and, as the richest man in the world, is an obvious analog for Elon Musk. Steve Carell plays Randy, the second richest man in the world, who is nevertheless powerless before his cancer. With his propensity for philosophising and his wide range of contacts in the industrial military complex, he is most reminiscent of Peter Thiel or Alex Karp of Palantir, though not a direct riff on either one. Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, the most grounded of the four; his company provides safe AI. Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo, the much put upon owner of the Mountainhead retreat, who, as the creator of a meditation app, is merely a centimillionaire.

The film begins immediately following the launch of a catastrophic new feature on Traan: an AI tool that gives users the power to create deepfakes indistinguishable from reality. Riots and carnage ensue in places as far afield as Libya and India, while in Paris the mayor is murdered. Ven alternately decries the images as fakes, or argues they are a necessary stage of learning: when the first cinema audiences thought that the train heading towards them was real, the answer was not to stop making films, he says. Nevertheless, Ven decides that the solution is to buy Jeff’s company, but Jeff isn’t selling.

As the Traan-inspired unrest becomes more extreme, they make ever more outlandish plans for coups and, inevitably, start plotting against each other. They rationalise their dark deeds in the gibberish language of tech ideology: the singularity, AGI, effective altruism, all that. By the end, in characteristic Jesse Armstrong style, even the character who seemed to be good, or at least not that evil, turns out to be thoroughly amoral after all.

Yet while Mountainhead is entertainingly scabrous, it doesn’t really hit its satirical targets. The first half, with its aristocratic horror at the febrile mob deranged by exposure to misinformation, is as conventional a critique of AI as they come. Certainly, AI has further weakened society’s increasingly tenuous grasp on the real, but the notion that the answer is “guardrails” of the kind provided by Jeff, fails to address that we have already seen what this kind of AI looks like: it depicts the Founding Fathers as black, among other distortions and obfuscations. As AI becomes the experience layer of the Internet, those who control what it is permitted to show us will have unprecedented power to distort reality themselves.

The larger problem, however, is that when it comes to tech billionaires, the truth is simply far stranger than Armstrong’s fiction. Ven has a business meeting with his baby, says weird stuff, and owns a social media company. But Elon Musk owns six companies, sired an army of children, plans to make humanity a multiplanetary species, dances with a chainsaw and is really good at video games. Likewise, Randy is much less interesting than Peter Thiel, a billionaire who travels the world giving lectures on the Antichrist. Jeff is no Sam Altman, the dead-eyed CEO of Open AI, or Ilya Sutskever, his former chief scientist who used to burn effigies of non-aligned AI at company meetings. And Hugo, the app lifestyle guy, is not a patch on Bryan Jonhson, the centimillionaire who has decided never to die and spends $2 million a year on anti-aging treatments.

Confronted with this monumental weirdness, Armstrong stumbles. In his vision, tech billionaires are simply greedy bastards, insecure megalomaniacs; his characters are four assholes caught in a pissing contest. In fact, they are not all that different from Mark and Jeremy, the Gen X flatmate losers of Peep Show. Look, says Armstrong, these guys aren’t so special. They’re lonely and sad and a bit stupid.

It’s a reassuring take, certainly, but probably not an accurate one. What if they’re not sad? What if they’re winners?  What if they have won at such a scale and for so long that their personalities have become transformed in ways that are difficult for the rest of us to grasp?

This is what makes the tech billionaire so difficult to satirise. Unlike previous oligarchs who got rich by doing normal things at a larger scale — selling more stuff for less, or monopolising a particular natural resource before anyone else could get their hands on it — the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg and Altman really do operate on a different plane. They imagine and invent futures, conjure forth fortunes from impossible feats of engineering and the manipulation of zeroes and ones, they bend reality to their will, they transform societies, they take huge risks and reap equally huge rewards. They are worshiped and reviled, sometimes both at the same time. They want to live on Mars. They want to live forever. And although they face setbacks, they generally… win. As a result, they have amassed a degree of power, wealth, fame and influence that few in human history have experienced — no one, in fact — until now.

Confronted with this sui generis state of affairs, Armstrong seeks to cut the billionaires down to size, but in doing so his targets zoom out of range. The times are so new and strange that our imagination is yet to catch up. Other, sharper, narrative strategies will be required if we are to capture the extremes of our age.

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Daniel Kalder is an author based in Texas. Previously, he spent ten years living in the former Soviet bloc. His latest book, Dictator Literature, is published by Oneworld. He also writes on Substack: Thus Spake Daniel Kalder.

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