“Mountainhead” Channels the Absurdity of the Tech Bro

Four tech billionaires walk into a mansion. It sounds like the setup for a punch line, but it also forms nearly the entire conceit behind “Mountainhead,” a savagely entertaining but somewhat shallow new satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of “Succession.” The film, which is streaming on HBO’s Max, is a sort of chamber play, its stage a modernist castle in Utah—the Mountainhead of the title—overlooking snowy peaks. The players are a quartet of friends, or, more accurately, frenemies, who resemble a mishmash of real-world Silicon Valley founders. Steve Carell plays Randall Garrett, the group’s Peter Thiel-esque mentor who, not unlike the late Steve Jobs, has cancer that his doctor tells him is incurable. (“Incorrect,” he claims. He’s waiting to upload his brain to “the grid.”) Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo Van Yalk, the founder of a “life-style super app.” He’s the owner of Mountainhead and the host of the gathering but is by far the poorest of the crew, worth a mere five hundred and twenty-one million. Cory Michael Smith plays Venis (as in “Venice,” not “penis”) Parish, a swole Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg stand-in who runs a social platform called Traam. Ramy Youssef is Jeff Abredazi, a slightly more high-minded entrepreneur, who’s built an artificial-intelligence-driven moderation tool called Bilter—social media’s “guardrails,” he calls it. But, in Armstrong’s universe, tech is never morally in the black, and the people who create it are no better than despots—inept ones, at that. Even any accelerationist ideals they hold are ultimately secondary to the mission of boosting their net worths, the only real terrain on which they care to compete.

“Mountainhead” skewers the figure of the heroic male entrepreneur, a Machiavellian archetype that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher may have inadvertently helped to construct with “The Social Network,” their 2010 film fictionalizing Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook. (“Like ‘Fountainhead’ Mountainhead?” Jeff asks, drawing the already obvious Ayn Rand connection.) Armstrong has said that he rushed to release the film out of a desire to capture “the bubble of time” that we’re currently living in, and with the timeliness of his project he has set himself quite the challenge. It’s not easy to create fictional tech tycoons outré enough to captivate an audience when we’re inundated daily with news of Musk, a distractable investor, inveterate gamer, and reported ketamine abuser (he denies this) who has fathered at least fourteen offspring with multiple women. The personality foibles on display in “Mountainhead”—spouting off about Hegel, fixating on cooking a turbot, even paranoiacally sending spies after a girlfriend—pale next to those in our reality. The film is stronger when it aims at the current ideological strain that animates parts of Silicon Valley, an exotic combination of biohacking, transhumanism, fascistic politics, and A.I. boosterism. (There’s no equivalent to the trollish coder turned far-right influencer Curtis Yarvin in the film, but he could have guest-starred as himself.)

Smith’s effectively appalling Venis, emanating manic frat-boy energy, wearing tight black-monochrome outfits over his optimized physique, is the group’s villain among villains. At the beginning of the film, he rolls out new features on Traam that include a kind of perfected generative-A.I. tool that can create “unfalsifiable” deepfake videos. As he proceeds to a weekend of leisure, the rest of the world descends into chaos caused by his app’s viral disinformation run amok. Fake footage sparks real terrorism, sectarian attacks, bank runs, and mass murder, yet Venis is solipsistically disdainful of the rest of humanity, asking Randall if eight billion other people could possibly be as “real” as they are. The four billionaires track news headlines from their screens and debate whether Venis should turn Traam’s tools off. Their moral calculations are rationalist, in a warped, Sam Bankman-Fried-like way: letting loose artificial general intelligence will eventually lead to billions of perfected, virtualized, immortal human lives, so anyone’s interim concerns about safety or ethics are just p(doom) levels out of whack. Venis, as the one who’s opened the Pandora’s box, is also a mirror version of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, minus Altman’s pretensions to caution.

“Mountainhead” develops into a claustrophobic drama that recalls the film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, “Leave the World Behind,” in which two families uneasily share a rental house as an apocalypse unfolds abstractly outside their doors. It’s also a sort of twenty-first-century “Waiting for Godot,” with billionaires sitting around anticipating their technological savior, an omnipotent A.I. that will surely provide them with immortality, if it doesn’t drive human hordes with pitchforks to their front door first. The action turns mildly slapstick: Hugo attempts to set out hors d’œuvres and cadge investment deals amid the slow-boiling mayhem; Venis boxes with a tree. Some of the bleakest comedy comes from Armstrong’s deployment of Silicon Valley argot. Randall notes that a failed murder has prompted “a ton of big, big learnings.” Hugo—whom the others call Soup, for “soup kitchen”—agonizes, in a scene that Schwartzman endows with twisted poignancy, that, unlike the others, he has failed to “go unicorn.” Venis entertains even the most ghoulish ideas with the question “Can we run a model?” Jeff is the group’s only voice of reason, but he, too, has an economic incentive to play along: as he puts it, “The worse the disease, the more valuable the cure.” (As the crisis deepens, he surpasses Randall in the billionaire rankings.) Armstrong is a bard of creatively profane dialogue, which here serves to capture the tech entrepreneurs’ incandescent combination of arrogance and puerility: at the opening of the film, Venis announces that Traam’s new tools are going to make the “printing press look like pre-cum.”

Armstrong is right about how unelected tech oligarchs wield control over billions of people’s perceptions of reality. Musk tweaks the X algorithm or Altman tinkers with ChatGPT’s inputs and suddenly information travels differently, along paths inclined toward their biases. Zuckerberg pivots toward A.I. and suddenly our feeds are filled with falsified, deceptive slop. Even before the film was released, some tech fans were criticizing it as an unfairly negative portrayal of the industry; at least Silicon Valley “hasn’t switched to apathy,” one Reddit commenter wrote. But what if the opposite of apathy is a belief that entrepreneurs can run nations better than elected officials, the same argument that led to Musk hacking through the federal government with his agency named after a meme. In Armstrong’s Schadenfreude-rich telling, all that power leaves tech founders personally miserable: the Randalls of the world seem to have nothing to live for except living longer. Tech wealth here looks even less appealing than that of the Roy family (the expensively beige décor is even uglier). “Mountainhead” lacks the arch dryness of “Succession”—the tone is lighter and looser, more cousin Greg than Roman Roy. But there are plenty of other hallmarks of the HBO series in the film, including the fetishistic footage of black cars rolling into driveways (this time, it’s more likely to be an environmentally friendly Rivian) with stony-faced passengers in the back, a carnivalesque piano soundtrack by Nicholas Britell, and the characters’ habit of ending sentences with a halting “yeah.” Plus, Armstrong gave us a glimpse of the Mountainhead milieu toward the end of “Succession,” when the Roy family’s company was acquired by Lukas Matsson, an emotionally vacant Scandinavian streaming entrepreneur with a personal philosophy of “privacy, pussy, pasta.”

Naturally, the “Mountainhead” gang decides that, rather than halt Traam’s destructive A.I., they should exploit the turmoil and, for lack of a better phrase, “take over the world,” all from the safety of their hideaway—or, as Venis dubs it, “humanity’s global HQ.” They collude with coup leaders over Zoom and cause brownouts in Europe, only to fall into an improvised plot against one of their own. The antics that ensue are amusing, but there isn’t much incisiveness in the increasingly farcical dog-eat-dog dénouement. The most potent moments tend to occur on the periphery of the action, in snippets featuring the billionaires’ downstairs courtier class, the assistants and lawyers who hustle at the corners of Hugo’s mansion. A woman representing Venis’s company board is the only person who can make him blink. Jeff’s distant, polyamorous relationship with his girlfriend almost makes one feel sorry for him. Still, Armstrong never really manages to create meaningful stakes or consequences for these characters, whose wealth insulates them even from one another’s depredations. We know the broligarchs are selfish, dissatisfied, and sociopathically unconcerned with the rest of humanity, because we’re suffering from their presence here in real life. What we don’t know is what to do about it, given that they remain as unreachable as a cliffside mansion, shaping the globe’s fate from their phones. ♦