Mark Zuckerberg has his Hawaiian ranch with its blast-resistant bunker. Elon Musk, his secretive Texas compound to stow his growing brood. Jeff Bezos, a $500 million superyacht reachable by his fiancée’s helicopter.
The private retreats of tech billionaires are absurd in their inaccessibility. But on the screen and on the page, they are now hard to avoid.
Aboard the plush business jets of the Facebook tell-all “Careless People” and the luxe “Triangle of Sadness” yacht, inside the alpine lodge of the HBO satire “Mountainhead” and the hyperreal virtual worlds of “Black Mirror” and “Made for Love,” we are invited to trail tech leaders into their secluded dens. As we hop from the private island of the silly murder mystery “Glass Onion” to the private island of the pop-feminist caper “Blink Twice,” we spy from the keyhole as they insulate themselves from reality, responsibility and humanity itself.
We cannot escape the material and psychic influence of the technological elite — and now, in our escapist entertainment, we imagine that they cannot escape us. We play at sneaking into their opulent dens, assessing the décor and unlocking a deeper fantasy that somewhere within their fortified walls lie the secrets to their eventual ruin. In these plots, we see how their tech could be unplugged, their power revoked, their private deeds exposed. All it would take is one interloper — usually a woman, often working-class — who has the insight and guile to blow the house down.
The villain has always had his lair. In the Bond movies (and their Austin Powers spoofs), tech-adjacent tycoons attempt to take over the world from some underground bunker, space station or mountain retreat. Now that such figures have acquired ever more political and market power, entire films, television series and novels squat inside their private arenas.
The spring comedy “Mountainhead” is a chamber drama set in a vacation house for the ultrarich where every major character is somewhat reprehensible, checking their phones inside a sterile sanctum as their own tech destroys the outside world. Often the lair in question — the tropical island of “Blink Twice,” the Davos depicted in “Careless People” — appears first as an enviable getaway before its dark secrets are revealed.
The structures in these stories are built from a heap of similar features. They may be wrapped in glass and styled with exposed industrial materials, producing a whiff of corporate transparency where none truly exists. Inside they may hide dungeonlike secured rooms and stashed trophies of the tech bro’s darkest deeds. Their remoteness suggests a vacation from the pressures of the real world, and proves that the owners have the considerable means necessary to access the inaccessible. But it also signals a lack of accountability, even an extralegal status. What happens in the compound stays there.
The exclusivity of these spaces, the supreme environmental control they offer, has the effect of making tech billionaires see the rest of humanity as less than human. In “Careless People,” Sarah Wynn-Williams’s insider account of her years at Facebook, she compares Zuckerberg’s insulated realm not to a bubble but to “a thick opaque dome,” a “fortress that separates him from the rest of the world.” Ensconced in their hideaway as the world burns, one of the tech bros of “Mountainhead” sincerely asks another: “Do you believe in other people?”
Occasionally the billionaire’s retreat is entirely artificial, a zone where he can use his resources to totally control other actors. In the HBO Max sci-fi series “Made for Love,” a tech billionaire’s wife escapes his virtual-reality compound only to discover he’s implanted a chip directly into her brain. In the 2017 “Black Mirror” episode “U.S.S. Callister” — and the sequel released this May — a pair of tech founders representing different odious types (Jimmi Simpson plays a playboy investor, Jesse Plemons an incel coder) get rich off an immersive game they call “Infinity.” Plemons’s coder creates his own version of the game where he can play around with cloned versions of his co-workers, torturing or seducing them according to his will. Meanwhile, Simpson’s playboy sets up his own spectating arena to watch from his all-glass office as his employees are systematically murdered in the game.
The glassy surfaces of the tech retreat skewer the industry’s stated ideals of openness and connectivity. The gala scenes of the 2024 film “Blink Twice” are lit in blinding white, suggesting that its wealthy guests have nothing to hide (all the better to lure in victims for their sex trafficking operation). The early drama of “Mountainhead” plays out in front of a massive window overlooking a valley far below; the assembled billionaires’ comfort with exposure is a testament to their untouchability. “Glass Onion” is all glass-themed, smashing the viewer over the head with the fragility of the wealthy. A picture window always portends shattered glass.
“Glass Onion” is the 2022 spinoff sequel to “Knives Out,” Rian Johnson’s celebrity-studded 2019 murder mystery. “Knives Out” was set in a wealthy old man’s spooky manse, in accordance with standard cozy whodunit vibes. “Glass Onion” transports the action to the charmless terrain of a tech billionaire’s estate on his own island. His architectural style — low-slung, sprawling, airless — has now become as familiar to mystery viewers as the creaky old house. Setting up a puzzle in a billionaire’s retreat — a move that “Blink Twice” borrows — gives the sense that entrenched systems of wealth and power can be reduced to the simplicity of a murder mystery or a criminal caper. The billionaire’s retreat distills his world dominance into a manageable domestic drama. The secret to his success can be solved by a lone investigator, his livelihood threatened by one unruly guest.
At this point, the tech hideaway risks suffering from overexposure. The surprise of the brilliant founder’s getaway in the 2014 film “Ex Machina,” a glassy Scandinavian structure with a fembot locked in its basement, has inspired unexceptional copies. Part of the problem is that the production designers’ visions are limited by the imaginations of real wealthy people. “Blink Twice” was filmed in a real-world hotel styled as a compound. “Mountainhead” is set in a Utah chalet that is itself inspired by the movies (its $65 million listing boasted a “private James Bond ski gondola”). Onscreen, the palace appears to deflate into a McMansion. “Mountainhead” addresses it head-on: “Just objectively a terrible design,” one of the tech bros says. “You only build a pedophile lair once.”
It takes a woman’s eye, however, to really see through the artifice. In “Glass Onion,” Janelle Monáe plays a schoolteacher who makes her way onto the genius billionaire’s island without an invitation and unmasks him as actually moronic. In “Blink Twice,” Naomi Ackie is a cater-waiter who is lured onto a sex trafficking mogul’s island, only to resist its temptations and light it aflame. The 2022 satire “Triangle of Sadness” has its wealthy guests — a tech millionaire among them — go overboard and wash up on a deserted isle, where they are at the mercy of Abigail, a member of the yacht’s cleaning staff and the only survivor with any real-world survival skills.
Before Wynn-Williams joined Facebook, she worked as a New Zealand diplomat, which qualifies her as a kind of unpretentious everywoman among the billionaire class. Her memoir so angered Facebook that it sued her over it, which probably helped to vault the book onto the best-seller list.
“Mountainhead” supplies a more realistic twist, by leaving its untouchable characters ultimately unscathed. Though potentially disruptive, lower-status visitors approach the chalet’s entrance — an angry girlfriend, a concerned board member, a gurgling baby — no one crosses the threshold without authorization. The sophomoric tagline the tech bros have coined for their retreat is “no deals, no meals, no high heels,” meaning no women with contrary motives to make things interesting. Though three of the moguls conspire to kill the fourth, they botch the hit; gasoline flows into the sauna, but no one lights a match. At weekend’s end, one imagines that any evidence of the conflict can be quietly disappeared by the staff, all damages mended with insurance.
The story of the everywoman on tech bro island follows a fairy tale’s logic. She smashes the billionaire’s glass, discovers his darkest secret and destroys his power. In the real world, no revelation of fraud, incompetence or abuse seems capable of dethroning him. If the billionaire’s house falls down, he will simply build another.
Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times, covering the intersection of internet and pop culture.
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