In case we don’t already spend enough time thinking about the sociopathic tech billionaires who are going to kill us all, HBO has a new movie premiering on May 31 about four such men. The film—called Mountainhead—is from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and is thus not exactly sympathetic to the cause of accelerationist, techno-libertarian transhumanists. But even a biting satire requires that we spend an unpleasant amount of time with these ghouls and their bad ideas.
Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo, an investor and app developer who is ashamed that he, unlike his billionaire friends, is only worth $550 million. As a way to flex what he does have, Hugo invites three masters of the universe to his brand sprawling new modernist ski bunker in Utah for a weekend of poker and manly bonding. This is some kind of annual ritual, a gathering to make merry and toss around the next great terrible notion about humanity’s future. This time, though, the outside world begins to intrude.
One of the guests, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), is the brash young founder of a globally dominant social media company that has just released an AI tool so effective it’s disrupting the world order. Venis tries to bluster past all the obvious disaster caused by his creation, but as his phone informs him of one violent uprising or government collapse after another—caused by disarmingly convincing AI videos and images—his confident strut takes on a nervous wobble.
A former pal turned rival, Jeff (Ramy Youssef), arrives for the weekend smug in the knowledge that he owns a technology that can easily identify Venis’s AI fakes, thus mitigating their impact. This tech is sought by the U.S. government in the hopes that it will curb the quickly spreading catastrophe. But Venis wants to buy it first, so he can manage its effect on his cool new toy. Jeff seems to have at least a slight conscience about the recklessness of his fellow billionaires, but he’s also interested in wielding petty power at this little party.
Venis has an ally in Randall (Steve Carell), the elder statesman of the group, a zillionaire venture capitalist whose interest in accelerationism—particularly of the kind that can move the world toward a post-human epoch—is partly guided by a terminal cancer diagnosis that he refuses to accept. In essence, we have a stand-in for Peter Thiel (if Peter Thiel was dying) going to bat for a slightly altered Mark Zuckerberg, with two composite characters rounding out the quartet.
Mountainhead was made in a hurry—it was filmed in March—and seemingly written as a response to the nightmarish takeover of government by tech freaks like Thiel and Elon Musk. These have indeed been sensational, frightening events, ones worth covering in scripted form. With his detailed knowledge of the towering arrogance and stupidity of the oligarch class, Armstrong would seem the ideal interpreter of all this madness.
And at times, Mountainhead delivers. It is grimly amusing to watch these awful men plot and scheme in the way we imagine guys like them—pseudo-philosophical, amoral, convinced that anyone who isn’t them is nothing but an NPC—do here in the real world. That kind of scary confirmation—imagined but ringing with truth—can be cathartic, just as it was on Succession.
But jolts of gallows-humor satisfaction can only carry Mountainhead so far. Given that this is filmed entertainment, we must at some point get to an actual story, which is where Armstrong falters. The plot, such as it is, emerges after tensions among the group rise to absurd heights—though I suspect Armstrong might argue they’re not so absurd at all. Either way, a crucial credibility is missing here. It’s becomes too easy to see Mountainhead as a mere hastily made comedy, a chance for these four actors to put on a kind of play, in which they can curse and spar and toss around a lot of inside-baseball lingo.
No one is really delving into the human heart of these characters—save, maybe, for Smith as the buffoonish, overgrown dorm-room nerd who refuses to grapple with the tangible consequences of his inventions. He keenly renders a geek thrilled (and still, deep down, shocked) to have become a god, his antipathy for the world clearly sourced from the most adolescent of grievances. Youssef tries to plumb some depths too, though his character is the most confusingly rendered—it’s not quite believable that Jeff would ever have been such a willing participant in this cabal.
Maybe the few moments when Mountainhead does take on a chilling relevance—when it seems to pick at something nightmarishly real—are enough to justify the sillier stuff. And, we must sadly admit, that silly stuff may not actually be that silly. This year, the sociopathy of the tech industry—or, at least, a faction of it—led to a cult murder spree, motivated in part by the so-called rationalist mindset that Armstrong is skewering here. To say nothing of the many people mortally harmed by, say, DOGE gutting various government programs.
If nothing else, Mountainhead is an introduction for those not terminally online to the profoundly unsettling ethos that has captured the chambers of money and power in this country, and around the world. As Saturday night entertainment, it falls short. And it’s not as informative as a journalistic long read. But at least it’s something, the slightest of pushes back against the people trying so offhandedly to grind us into soylent.
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