Jesse Armstrong's 'Mountainhead': A Scathing Satire of Tech Titans and AI's Impact on Society

A Succession for our time of tech titans -- Mountainhead film review

Spoiler alert. A popular verbal obscenity comes midway through Mountainhead. (The first word is four letters, the second is "off".) It is a doozy too. Fans of Jesse Armstrong's much-loved series Succession grew used to the phrase as a punchline, delivered by star Brian Cox as corporate overlord Logan Roy. For the showrunner, now making his debut as a feature director, it might even be a security blanket. But you can also take the film as an unofficial sequel. Succession dealt with a legacy media empire. Now Armstrong trains an acid eye on the people who claim the same scale of raw power newspapers once had: the kings of tech. The scene is Mountainhead, a pun on Ayn Rand's Fountainhead that serves as the name for the ultra-luxe pile in snowy Utah where four old pals gather for poker and chat. The meetups are regular, though now given a frisson by what might be the total collapse of human civilisation. For that, we can first thank Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a CEO at the junction of AI and social media, whose latest bright ideas have brought market bedlam, a spike in sectarian violence and endless morbid symptoms of a global meltdown. Still, on a personal level, life is sweet. This is more than can be said for his mentor, Randall (Steve Carell), arriving after receiving bad medical news. (It is Carell who later delivers that grandstand F-bomb.) Silicon Valley being small as it is, Randall also once backed Jeff (Ramy Youssef), Venis's former business partner, and now the conscience of the group. That just leaves Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who despite playing host at Mountainhead, is the runt of the litter: the only non-billionaire, still stuck pitching apps. Of course, a lot of the fun here is the broad wink to the real-life figures the characters are in no way based on -- in the same sense Logan Roy was absolutely not Rupert Murdoch. Randall is a ringer for svengali financier and Tolkien nut Peter Thiel even before he is referenced as "Dark Money Gandalf". Smug, trollish and AI boosterish, Venis is a younger, buffer Elon Musk with a twist of Sam Altman. That may be one of Armstrong's best jokes, given how much the two nemeses would hate being bundled into one character. And Jeff? One dark little thought the film could leave you with is that there is, by contrast, no high-profile match for the lone voice pleading for caution and guardrails. (OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever might be the closest thing.) Hugo, meanwhile, has a purer dramatic function: his need for a cash a plot point tucked away for later in the movie. As with The Thick of It, which Armstrong co-wrote, the sell is the fly-on-the-wall, an imagined eavesdrop among masters of the universe. The result is a frantic ping-pong of four-sided one-upmanship. There is much effortful frat-boy banter. Armstrong does a great line in the wincing comedy of unfunny people being oblivious to the fact. (Does anyone alive laugh harder than Elon Musk's assistants?) Once the razzing stops, there are still constant ego flexes, and clunking name-drops of great philosophers. "I take Kant very seriously!" Randall seethes, with the air of a red-faced toddler about to throw their dinner at the wall. The humour is still pitched to waspish as some of the group now decide the spiralling chaos in the wider world is actually a historical cue. Next stop -- at last! -- the crushing of the dead hand of government by nation state. "That's why I'm so excited about these atrocities!" Venis beams. The movie was only shot in March, a breakneck fast turnaround for filmmaking. The sense of right-here-right-now can lend the satire real sting. The only snag is that you notice when the sharpness dulls. Given that the movie itself brings up the US presidency, what follows can feel fuzzy. And for all the references to New Zealand bunkers, AGI and race science, it becomes clear too that the movie isn't built on first-hand experience, but is rather a deft comic assembly of detail culled from existing reportage. The natural audience may have already been trained on the data. Still, you suspect the real-life models for Venis, Randall and the rest would fail to find the movie funny. What better mark of success could there be? (Also: it is funny.) The cherry on top is the mocking of the architects of the future being done with that dusty old-world device, a feature film, grounded in the human excellence of actors such as Carell and Schwartzman: it makes for an admirable gesture, even if the joke might soon prove to be on all of us. ★★★★☆

Opinion | From the Creator of 'Succession,' a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right

In November, when the "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, "Mountainhead," he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump's inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiers on Saturday on HBO -- an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, "a feeling of nowness." He's succeeded. Much of the pleasure of "Mountainhead" is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villains. No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day's news cycle. But art can help; it's not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy. In "Mountainhead," three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hanger-on they call Souper, short for "soup kitchen," because he's a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic, juvenile Venis -- the richest man in the world -- has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deepfakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes or desecrating sacred sites, and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internecine violence turns into apocalyptic global instability. It's not a far-fetched premise. Facebook posts accusing Muslims of rape have already helped fuel a genocide in Myanmar, and tools like those that Venis unleashes seem more likely to be months than years away. Venis's foil is Jeff, who has built an A.I. that can filter truth from falsehood and whose flashes of conscience put him at odds with the others. Rounding out the quartet is Randall, a venture capitalist -- played by a terrific Steve Carrell -- who pontificates like the bastard offspring of the investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. As the planet melts down, they start fantasizing about taking over "a couple of failing nations" and running them like start-ups. "We intellectually and financially back a rolling swap-out to crypto network states, populations love it, and it snowballs," says Randall. But as the global crisis spirals and the dread specter of regulation appears, their ambitions expand. The group seems to have a good relationship with the unnamed president, but they also regard him as an idiot. After the president chastises Venis, they start thinking about replacing him. Given the administration's "wobbles," Venis asks, "do we just get upstream, leverage our hardware, software, data, scale this up and coup out the U.S.?" While "Succession" was a series about a media industry in decline, "Mountainhead" is a movie about men who feel they own the future. This is what makes them -- both the fictional characters and their real-world analogues -- frightening. At a moment when our institutions are in free fall and most elites seem dazed, these men are ready, as the Silicon Valley cliché says, to move fast and break things. "Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?" asks Randall. Venis, like Elon Musk, longs to leave Earth itself behind. "I just feel like if I could get us off this rock, it would solve so much," he says, using an obscenity. Some of the ideas in "Mountainhead" had been percolating in Armstrong's mind since 2023, when he reviewed Michael Lewis's book about Sam Bankman-Fried for The Times Literary Supplement, and proceeded to devour a bunch of other books about Silicon Valley. "I was able to read widely about Zuckerberg and Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel," he said, eventually borrowing from all of them as he crafted his characters. He also listened to techcentric podcasts like Lex Fridman's and "All-In," one of whose hosts, David Sacks, is now the White House's crypto czar. People on these shows often speak in a sort of patois loaded with insider references and futuristic nonsense, delivered with blithe confidence that the rules of computer coding can be easily applied to human society. It's a tone that Armstrong nails with uncanny precision. "I think they think that their philosophical approach can solve any problem," Armstrong said of the tech barons. "And I find that amusing and scary." It's an open question, in "Mountainhead," how seriously we should take the men's scheming. The characters are titanically arrogant, but outside their domains, they are not particularly effectual. "There's a lot of society and government which is not amenable to a tech approach," said Armstrong. "DOGE may have discovered that, and so may anyone who tries to engage with systems with a lot of real human beings in them." Still, America's tech plutocrats have expansive plans, fortunes that make Gilded Age robber barons look like paupers and an ungodly amount of political power, even now that Musk has stepped back from the White House. The "big, beautiful bill" that the House just passed contains a 10-year moratorium on state A.I. regulation. Musk's company SpaceX is a front-runner for the contract to build Trump's Golden Dome missile defense shield. When the president went to Saudi Arabia this month, he brought a passel of tech executives with him. Journalists can write exposés about these men, just as they have about the family of Rupert Murdoch, on whom "Succession" was based. But art and entertainment can make such figures feel real in a more visceral, emotional way. That's one reason it's important for pop culture to engage with America's disorienting descent into clownish authoritarianism. Doing so isn't easy; Trump is eager to punish both media companies and artists that displease him. Two weeks ago, after Bruce Springsteen denounced the administration on his European tour, the president wrote online that he should "KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the country," adding, in what sounded like a veiled threat, "Then we'll all see how it goes for him!" "Mountainhead" isn't about Trump, but it is about people to whom he's given nearly free rein. Considering how cowardly many media executives have been about crossing the president, I wondered if Armstrong had any problem getting the movie made. He said, however, that HBO was supportive: "Maybe they had some qualms, but I've never felt the vibrations myself." I hope audiences reward the network for that. "Mountainhead" is the first movie I've seen about now, but many more should follow. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.