Jesse Armstrong's 'Mountainhead': A Satirical Take on Tech Billionaires and AI

Jesse Armstrong Finds Sympathy for 'Rich Assholes' in Mountainhead

Jesse Armstrong hadn't planned on making another project about billionaires. The Succession creator was taking a break after finishing HBO's Emmy-winning series about the ludicrously wealthy siblings fighting for control over their father's media conglomerate, which ended in May 2023. But while writing a review of journalist Michael Lewis' book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, about crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, Armstrong got sucked into listening to podcasts featuring tech elites. It inspired him to write and direct his first feature: Mountainhead, a movie about three tech billionaires and their less rich, deeply insecure friend, all of whom have far too much power at their disposal. "I couldn't get the ... tech voice, tech man voice, a billionaire, out of my head," Armstrong says, noting that to him, that voice embodies both "supreme confidence in their analytical abilities" and "arrogance." Armstrong is being nice here. The word that repeatedly came to my mind while watching the foursome trade jargon, insults, and delusions of grandeur for the movie's nearly two-hour run time was douchebag. The film, which will start streaming on HBO May 31, stars Steve Carell as venture capitalist Randall; Jason Schwartzman as Hugo Van Yalk, whose nickname "Souper" is a reference to a soup kitchen -- and his lower net worth; Cory Michael Smith as Venis, a Zuck-Elon figure unleashing hyperrealistic deepfakes on his platform Traam; and Ramy Youssef as Jeff, who plans on profiting big from releasing AI that can counter the chaos his pal Venis is wreaking on the world. The friends meet up for a retreat in the mountains, hosted by Souper, whose fixation on impressing the cohort with his home decor and food platters is met with scorn by the others. They have a "no deals, no meals, no high heels" rule for the weekend. But the fun -- in their case, snowmobiling to a peak and writing their net worths on their chests with lipstick -- is eventually superseded by plots to take over the world and "coup out the US." Mountainhead came together in just a few months, against the backdrop of President Donald Trump's second term in office, much of which has been dominated by Elon Musk's DOGE mission. Shooting took place over a few weeks this spring. While Carell says there were upsides to the tight turnaround -- "everyone's just trusting their gut" -- Schwartzman says quickly attaining fluency in the "tech voice" Armstrong was going for was a challenge for him. "At a certain point I said to Jesse, if you ever want us to say anything extra, do you have a glossary or a dictionary," Schwartzman says. "It's like if you were doing a movie in French and then improvise something in Italian." While Armstrong acknowledges that some people might react to his latest project by asking, "Why should I care about these rich assholes," he refrains from outright making a judgment about them. "I do feel some sympathy for the real people grappling with some of this tech, because it is a bit of a hall of mirrors," Armstrong says. "Lots of people go into, especially AI, with a sense of the power of the technology, and I think, as far as I can tell, a genuine sense of responsibility."

Mountainhead succeeds at showing you how truly deranged the billionaire mindset can be

Charles Pulliam-Moore is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years. The degree to which Mountainhead, HBO's new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you laugh depends almost entirely on how much news you consume about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by fate to shape the arc of history. The more time you've spent listening to Silicon Valley types wax poetic about reality being a simulation, "universal basic compute," and how humanity is a "biological bootloader" for artificial intelligence, the less Mountainhead's CEO characters come across as being amusing caricatures. But if you're part of the lucky bunch that has never bothered listening to billionaires insist that they're going to achieve immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead might strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class. Especially in this moment where we've all been able to watch some of the world's richest tech overlords prostrate themselves before Donald Trump in hopes of amassing even more power, the movie's depiction of tech bros flirting with the idea of taking over the world seems so plausible that it almost doesn't work as satire. But each of Mountainhead's lead performances is infused with a manic, desperate energy that makes the film feel like an articulation of the idea that, when you strip all the self-aggrandizing mythos away, billionaire founders are just people with enough money to make their anxieties and insecurities everyone else's problem. Though it's narrative territory we've seen Armstrong explore before, Mountainhead is no Succession. Compared to Armstrong's more expansive episodic work, there's a breathless urgency to his first feature that reflects the speed with which he wrote and shot it. But the film does make you appreciate how dangerous and divorced from reality today's titans of industry tend to be when left to their own devices. Set almost entirely in a palatial lodge nestled high up in the Utah mountains, Mountainhead revolves around a quartet of absurdly wealthy frenemies who come together for a weekend of rest, relaxation, and metaphorical dick measuring while the rest of the world hurtles toward a doomsday scenario. On some level, social media tycoon Venis (Cory Michael Smith) knows that the new generative AI tools rolling out on his Twitter-like platform, Traam, have the potential to incite chaos by feeding people deepfaked footage designed to keep them angry and endlessly scrolling. Venis has seen the news reports about multiple outbreaks of violence targeted at immigrants and ethnic minorities. He's also heard commentators linking his creation to a widespread erosion of trust on a societal level. But with his net worth at an all-time high, it's easy for the twitchy CEO to ignore all that bad press and dismiss the disturbing imagery flooding Traam. Similar to Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning, Mountainhead frames AI's ability to obfuscate the truth and manipulate people's perceptions of reality as the kind of threat that should give everyone pause. But rather than telling a story about humans racing to stop a tech-driven apocalypse, Armstrong is much more interested in exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence's potential for harm is directly connected to the worldviews of those who create it. Venis isn't the only tech mogul ready to roll his eyes as Traam's AI continues to stoke unrest and violence around the globe. Almost all of his closest friends -- a small group of men who call themselves the Brewsters -- feel exactly the same way. James (Steve Carell), a steely Steve Jobs type who refuses to accept the reality of his terminal cancer diagnosis, sees Traam's popularity as a sign that Venis is on the right path and setting himself up to corner the market on digitizing human consciousness within a decade. Even though Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the creator of a rival AI toolset that can reliably identify deepfakes, has gone on the podcast circuit understandably trash-talking Venis, he can't deny that Traam's dangerous slop has led to an exponential growth of his own valuation. And as the "poorest" member of the Brewsters, multimillionaire health nut Hugo / "Soup Kitchen" (Jason Schwartzman), is more than willing to cosign basically anything his friends do. Some of it boils down to Soup's need for an influx of cash for his next business venture -- an ill-conceived wellness and meditation app. But the deeper truth that Armstrong repeatedly highlights is that groups like the Brewsters always need someone around who's willing to play a game of boar on the floor or eat a soggy biscuit to make themselves feel like they're all having a good time. The desire to have a good time is ostensibly why Soup invites the other Brewsters to come spend the weekend at Mountainhead, his drearily chic vacation home that reeks of new money and a juvenile obsession with Ayn Rand. But once the group has gotten together and sent their assistants -- most of the movie's sparingly few women characters -- away, it isn't long before the boys' deep-seated resentments of one another start bubbling to the surface. And when the unnamed president of the United States calls up Venis and Jeff to discuss how the Traam deepfake situation is getting worse by the minute, the group takes it as a sign that they might be looking at an opportunity to play and win a game of real IRL Risk. Given how relatively few places it physically takes its characters, Mountainhead does a solid job of not feeling like a claustrophobic play about delusional billionaires beefing on top of a mountain. Few of the Brewsters' digs at each other are truly laugh-out-loud funny, but what's impressive is how each of the characters feels like a distinct embodiment of the culture that gave birth to the modern celebrity tech founder archetype. Armstrong wants us to see these people as ghouls who are beyond high on their own supplies, but also as profoundly broken men whose fixations on biometrics and being seen as sigma men speak to a deeper sense of inescapable inadequacy. Things like James' tense relationship with his personal doctor and the odd, vaguely homoerotic game of wits Venis and Jeff start to play in Mountainhead's third act are intriguing. But they're also part of what makes the film feel like it might have been more compelling as a miniseries with enough time and space to show us more of how the Brewsters move through the world and what besides their money would make these four men want to spend time with one another. Just when Mountainhead starts to get juicy and unhinged, it rushes to a dramatic climax that feels right-minded, but premature. It's almost as if Armstrong means to leave you unsatisfied as a way of emphasizing how people like the Brewsters seldom get what they really deserve. As a piece of eat (and ogle) the rich social commentary, Mountainhead works fine if you're craving a cheeky, surface-level indictment of tech barons who fancy themselves as gods. But if you're looking for something more dramatic and substantive, you might be better off just reading the news. Mountainhead also stars Hadley Robinson, Andy Daly, Ali Kinkade, Daniel Oreskes, David W. Thompson, Amie MacKenzie, and Ava Kostia. The movie debuts on HBO May 31st.

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. ★★★★☆

The First Film of the DOGE Era Is Here

It's late morning on a Monday in March and I am, for reasons I will explain momentarily, in a private bowling alley deep in the bowels of a $65 million mansion in Utah. Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of HBO's hit series Succession, approaches me, monitor headphones around his neck and a wide grin on his face. "I take it you've seen the news," he says, flashing his phone and what appears to be his X feed in my direction. Of course I had. Everyone had: An hour earlier, my boss Jeffrey Goldberg had published a story revealing that U.S. national-security leaders had accidentally added him to a Signal group chat where they discussed their plans to conduct then-upcoming military strikes in Yemen. "Incredibly fucking depressing," Armstrong said. "No notes." The moment felt a little bit like a glitch in the simulation, though it also pinpointed exactly the kind of challenge facing Armstrong. I had traveled to Park City to meet him on the set of Mountainhead, a film he wrote and directed for HBO (and which premieres this weekend). Mountainhead is an ambitious, extremely timely project about a group of tech billionaires gathering for a snowy poker weekend just as one of them releases AI-powered tools that cause a global crisis. Signalgate was the latest, most outrageous bit of news from the Trump administration that seemed to shift the boundaries of plausibility. How can Armstrong possibly satirize an era where reality feels like it's already cribbing from his scripts? The film was billed to me as an attempt to capture the real power and bumbling hubris of a bunch of arrogant and wealthy men (played by Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef) who try to rewire the world and find themselves in way over their heads. This was an easy premise for me to buy into, not just because of Signalgate, but also because I'd spent the better part of the winter reporting on Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government, during which time DOGE had reportedly made a 19-year-old computer programmer who goes by the online nickname "Big Balls" a senior adviser to the State Department. In order to keep the film feeling fresh in this breakneck news cycle, Armstrong pushed to complete the project on an extraordinarily short timeline: He pitched the film in December and wrote parts of the script in the back of a car while driving around with location scouts. When we met, Youssef told me that the "way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall." Read: The 400-year-old tragedy that captures our chaos By the time I met Armstrong -- affable and easygoing both on and off set -- he was unfazed by fact seeming stranger than his fiction. "There's almost something reassuring about it," he said. "It's all moving so fast and is so hard to believe that it allows me to just focus on the story I want to tell. I'm not too worried about the news beating me to the punch." Lots of his work, including Succession and some writing on political satires, such as Veep and The Thick of It, draw loose and sometimes close inspiration from current events. The trick, Armstrong told me, is finding a "comfortable distance" from what's happening in reality. The goal is to let audiences bring their context to his art but still have a good time and not feel as if they're doomscrolling. For instance, one of the main characters in Mountainhead is an erratic social-media mogul named Venis (played by Smith), who's also the richest man in the world. But the comparisons to our real tech moguls aren't one-to-one. "I don't think you'd think he's a Musk cipher, nor is he a Zuck, but he takes something from him and probably from Sam Altman and maybe from Sam Bankman-Fried," Armstrong said. Mountainhead is Armstrong's first project since Succession. That show's acclaim -- 19 Emmy and nine Golden Globe wins -- cemented Armstrong and his team of writers as the preeminent satirists of contemporary power and wealth. His decision to focus on the tech world can feel like a cultural statement of its own. Succession managed to capture the depravity, hilarity, and emptiness of modern politics, media, and moguldom existing parallel to the perpetual real-life crises of its run from 2018 to 2023. But while Mountainhead has plenty of Succession's DNA -- sharing many of the same producers and writers, and some of the crew -- it's much more of a targeted strike than the 39-episode HBO show. Rather than a narrative epic of unserious failsons, the film offers a relatively straightforward portrait of buffoonish elites who believe that their runaway entrepreneurial success entitles them to rule over the lower-IQ'd masses. In some ways, Mountainhead picks up where a different HBO series, Silicon Valley, left off, exploring the limits of and poking fun at the myth of tech genius, albeit with a far darker tenor. The tech guys weren't supposed to be the next group up in the blender, Armstrong told me. He was trying to work on a different project when he became interested in the fall of Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire. Armstrong is a voracious reader and something of a media nerd -- on set, he joked that he's probably accidentally paying for dozens of niche Substacks -- and quickly went down the tech rabbit hole. Reading news articles turned into skimming through biographies. Eventually, he ended up on YouTube, absorbed by the marathon interviews that tech titans did with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and the gab sessions on the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks. "In the end, I just couldn't stop thinking about these people," he told me. "I was just swimming in the culture and language of these people for long enough that I got a good voice in my head. I got some of the vocabulary, but also the confidence-slash-arrogance." As with Succession, vocabulary and tone are crucial to Mountainhead's pacing, humor, and authenticity. Armstrong and his producers have peppered the script with what he described as "podcast earworms." At one point, Carell's character, Randall, the elder-statesman venture capitalist, describes Youssef's character as a "decel with crazy p(doom) and zero risk tolerance." (Decel stands for a technological decelerationist; p(doom) is the probability of an AI apocalypse.) "There was a lot of deciphering, a lot of looking up of phrases for all of us -- taking notes and watching podcasts," Carell told me about his rapid preparation process. When we spoke, all of the actors stressed that they didn't model their characters off individual people. But some of the portraits are nonetheless damning. Youssef's character, Jeff, the youngest billionaire of the bunch, has built a powerful AI tool capable of stemming the tide of disinformation unleashed by Venis's social network. He has misgivings about the fallout from his friend's platform, but also sees his company's stock rising because of the chaos. From the April 2025 issue: Growing up Murdoch "One of the first things I said to Jesse was that I saw my younger, less emotionally developed self in the level of annoyingness, arrogance, and crudeness -- mixed with a soft emotional instability -- in Jeff," Youssef told me. "He reminded me of me in high school. I thought, These are the kind of guys who started coding in high school, and it's probably where their emotions stalled out in favor of that rampant ambition." This halted adolescence was a running theme. On a Tuesday evening around 9 p.m., I stood on set watching five consecutive takes of a scene (that was later cut from the film) where Youssef jumps onto a chair while calling a honcho at the IMF, and starts vigorously humping Schwartzman's head. The mansion itself is like a character in the film. The production designer Stephen Carter told me it was chosen in part because "it feels like something that was designed to impress your friends" -- an ostentatious glass-and-metal structure with a private ski lift, rock wall, bowling alley, and a full-size basketball court. Carter, who also did production design on Succession, said that it's important to Armstrong that his productions are set in environments that accurately capture and mimic the scale of wealth and power of its characters. "Taste is fungible," Carter told me, "but the amount of square footage is not." They knew they'd settled on the right property when Marcel Zyskind, the director of photography, visited. "He almost felt physically ill when he walked into the house," Carter said. "Sort of like it was a violation of nature or something." The costuming choices reflected the banality of the tech elites, with a few flourishes, like the bright Polaris snowmobile jumpsuits and long underwear worn in one early scene. "Jesse has them casually decide the fate of the world while wearing their long johns," the costume designer, Susan Lyall, recounted. True sickos like myself, who've followed the source material and news reports closely, can play the parlor game of trying to decode inspirations ripped from the headlines. Carell's character has the distinct nihilistic vibes of a Peter Thiel, but also utters pseudophilosophic phrases like "in terms of Aurelian stoicism and legal simplicity" that read like a Marc Andreessen tweetstorm of old. Schwartzman's character, Souper -- the poorest of the group, whose nickname is short for soup kitchen -- gives off an insecure, sycophantic vibe that reminds me of an acolyte from Musk's text messages. Read: Elon Musk's texts shatter the myth of the tech genius But Armstrong insists he's after something more than a roast. What made tech billionaires so appealing to him as a subject matter is their obsession with scale. To him, their extraordinary ambitions and egos, and the speed with which they move through the world, makes their potential to flame out as epic as their potential to rewire our world. And his characters, while eminently unlikable, all have flashes of tragic humanity. Venis seems unable to connect with his son; Jeff is wracked with a guilty conscience; Randall is terrified of his looming mortality; and Souper just wants to be loved. "I think where clever and stupid meet is quite an interesting place for comedy," Armstrong told me when I asked him about capturing the tone of the tech world. "And I think you can hear those two things clashing quite a lot in the discussions of really smart people. You know, the first-principles thinking, which they're so keen on, is great. But once you throw away all the guardrails, you can crash, right?" By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he's satirizing. Perhaps because he's written from their perspective, he's empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. "It's like how the politician always thinks they've got the answer," he said. But he contends that Silicon Valley's scions could have more influence than those lawmakers. They can move faster than Washington's sclerotic politicians. There's less oversight too. The innovators don't ask for permission. Congress needs to pass laws; the tech overlords just need to push code to screw things up. "In this world where unimaginable waves of money are involved, the forces that are brought to bear on someone trying to do the right thing are pretty much impossible for a human to resist," he said. "You'd need a sort of world-historical figure to withstand those blandishments. And I don't think the people who are at the top are world-historical figures, at least in terms of their oral capabilities." For Armstrong, capturing the humanity of these men paints a more unsettling portrait than pure billionaire-trolling might. For example, these men feel superhuman, but are also struggling with their own mortality and trying to build technologies that will let them live forever in the cloud. They are hyperconfident and also deeply insecure about their precise spots on the Forbes list. They spout pop philosophy but are selling nihilism. "We're gonna show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that fucking serious," Venis says at one point in the film. "Nothing means anything. And everything's funny and cool." In Mountainhead, as the global, tech-fueled chaos begins, Randall leads the billionaires in an "intellectual salon" where the group imagine the ways they could rescue the world from the disaster they helped cause. They bandy about ideas about "couping out" the United States or trying to go "post-human" by ushering in artificial general intelligence. At one point, not long after standing over a literal map of the world from the board game Risk, one billionaire asks, "Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?" Another quips: "I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market." The paternalistic overconfidence of Armstrong's tech bros delivers the bulk of both the dark humor and the sobering cultural relevance in Mountainhead. Armstrong doesn't hold the viewers' hand, but asks them to lean into the performance. If they do, they'll see a portrayal that might very well give necessary context to the current moment: a group of unelected, self-proclaimed kings who view the world as a thought experiment or a seven-dimensional chess match. The problem is that the rest of us are the pawns. "The scary thing is that usually -- normally -- democracy provides some guardrails for who has the power," Armstrong said near the end of our conversation. "But things are moving too fast for that to work in this case, right?" Mountainhead will certainly scratch the itch for Succession fans. But unlike his last hit, which revolved around blundering siblings who are desperate to acquire the power that their father wields, Armstrong's latest is about people who already have power and feel ordained to wield it. It's a dark, at times absurdist, comedy -- but with the context of our reality, it sometimes feels closer to documentary horror.

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: [email protected]. Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.

'Mountainhead' Review: While We Go Down, They Bro Down

Over four seasons of "Succession," the creator, Jesse Armstrong, told the story of people who control the world by selling ideas: the Roy family, who ran and fought over a media and entertainment empire. Toward its end, as their business was sold to a tech entrepreneur, "Succession" suggested that power was shifting, and that the future belonged to silicon hyperbillionaires. In his film "Mountainhead," which premieres Saturday on HBO, that future has arrived, and it is both terrifying and ridiculous -- not unlike our present. In the scabrous story of a weekend getaway for four tech-mogul frenemies, Armstrong finds that our new bro overlords are rich targets for satire, though when it comes to depth, nuance and insight, their story has nothing on the Roys'. As "Mountainhead" begins, countries around the globe are erupting in hatred and sectarian violence, fueled by A.I.-generated propaganda. This chaos is the whoopsie of Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a chuckleheaded social-media entrepreneur whose company pushed a half-baked software update that gave bad actors around the world the sudden ability to create unfalsifiable deepfake videos. (The name "Venis," a seeming portmanteau of "venal" and "penis" that is pronounced "Venice," is Armstrong's sensibility in five letters.) The world is burning. But in the snowy, Randian-named retreat that gives its name to "Mountainhead," Venis has arrived to chill with his boys. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has developed possibly the only A.I. capable of weeding out the dangerous fake videos from Venis's company. Randall (Steve Carell), a self-styled philosopher-exec, tosses around terms like "Hegelian" in a way that makes you wonder if he's ever finished a book. And Hugo Van Yalk (a wonderfully debased Jason Schwartzman), the owner of the property, is a meditation-app developer nicknamed "Soup" -- for "soup kitchen" -- because his net worth is a mere half billion dollars. The edgy bro-down that ensues is fueled by unspoken rivalries and schemes. Venis wants Jeff to sell him his A.I., which would allow him to call off the apocalypse without having to do an embarrassing recall of the update. Randall, who has received a concerning diagnosis, is keen on Venis's plan to usher in the "transhuman" era by uploading people's consciousnesses to the cloud. Soup wants someone to fund his anemic wellness app and finally add a zero to his humiliating nine-digit wealth. The film centers almost entirely on this quartet. (Like the Roys, they mash up aspects of several real-life analogues -- Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and more.) The narrow focus matches their perspective: The four men see themselves as the only real people in the world, while the other eight billion of us are NPCs. At one point, Venis asks Randall, "Do you believe in other people?" The only reasonable answer is, "Obviously not!" As they drink and spar and occasionally scroll images of burning cities on their phones, the talk turns to whether they should possibly do something about the apocalypse. Venis could pull the plug on his update, yes, but couldn't chaos be opportunity? Could this be an opportunity to do a hard reset on humanity, to move fast and break countries, pushing through upheaval to a new order ruled by -- oh, maybe someone like themselves? Explore More in TV and Movies Not sure what to watch next? We can help. Then and Now, It's a Thrill to Star Alongside Stitch 'The Rehearsal' Argues That Cringe Comedy Can Save Lives Create your free account and enjoy unlimited access -- free for 7 days. Start free trial What We Know About 'The Paper,' the Upcoming 'Office' Spinoff 'The Sealed Soil': Modesty and Its Discontents The Movies We've Loved Since 2000 The 50 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now The 30 Best TV Shows on Netflix Right Now The 50 Best Movies on Max Right Now The 50 Best TV Shows and Movies to Watch on Disney+ Right Now Much as real-life tech entrepreneurs often find themselves "innovating" high-concept versions of existing technology like the bus, the film's manic moguls find themselves reinventing coups, oligarchy and murder. (Sorry: "Disrupting the blood.") There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm, only deadly ones. The dumbest geniuses in the world, getting wasted and gaming out the collapse of civilization in a tacky modernist aerie: This is Armstrong's sweet spot. (The distinction between privileged "real people" and the masses was a frequent theme of "Succession" as well.) On a line-by-line basis, "Mountainhead" is savagely funny. Armstrong wrote, cast and shot the film within the space of months, and it has a fierce energy. But there is also something a little off about "Mountainhead," both on a plot and character level. There's some hand-waving of the details of how Venis's misinformation software set the world on fire and how Jeff's A.I. might douse it, though that's easy enough to get past. The bigger problem is that Armstrong's entrepreneurs are sharp satirical cartoons but not really plausible people. Armstrong had four seasons to layer in character depth that gave resonance to the savage satire of "Succession," but he hasn't adapted his style to do the same in a two-hour movie. Imagine being stuck in a room with Roman Roy -- Kieran Culkin's witty, self-hating "Succession" character -- without having gotten any understanding of his psyche to contextualize his machine-gun quips. That's "Mountainhead," times four. No one here reveals much of themselves beyond their first, worst impression, with the exception of Youssef's Jeff, who is -- unusually for an Armstrong protagonist -- decent but boring. Still, what "Mountainhead" lacks in depth, it makes up for in satirical daring. Armstrong's hallmarks are present: a brutal sense of interpersonal power dynamics, a flair for creative profanity, an abiding belief that the worst people will succeed. If "Mountainhead" is one-note, that note is a piercing one: Armstrong takes the tech-lord principle of "accelerationism" -- floor the pedal on change and damn the consequences for the little people -- to a chilling conclusion. When you're perched on top of the world, the film argues, acceleration takes you straight downhill.

Review | The next target for the creator of 'Succession'? Tech bros, obvs.

Steve Carell stars as a delusional tech lord in "Mountainhead," Jesse Armstrong's stagy, feature-length satire on Max. (2.5 stars) What do you do after "Succession"? Whom do you skewer once you've impaled the world's media titans and their deeply dysfunctional families on their own hubris over the course of four seasons? That's easy. You go after the tech bros. "Mountainhead" is the latest from "Succession" writer-director Jesse Armstrong -- no surprise, it's available on HBO's streaming service, Max -- and it's something more and rather less: a feature-length film that places four obscenely rich Silicon Valley overlords in a snowbound mansion as the world burns down around them and they plot to leverage the situation to their profits and power. It's a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected. The cast makes "Mountainhead" work as well as it does. Cory Michael Smith (the young Chevy Chase in the recent "Saturday Night") plays Venis Parish, the swaggering young CEO of Traam, the world's most popular social media platform; the analogue is Mark Zuckerberg, and the wardrobe is Steve Jobs, but the character's outsize ego and aggressive utopian double-talk place him closer to Elon Musk at his scariest. Traam has just released a suite of artificial intelligence tools that allow the creation of deepfake images and videos; the result has been worldwide violence and tottering global markets, a societal meltdown that the quartet refuses to let ruin their poker weekend. Venis's friend, rival and former co-founder Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has created a better and more ethically transparent AI product -- "AI with guardrails," he calls it -- that Traam might be willing to buy if Jeff's willing to sell. (He's Sam Altman, or thereabouts.) Their host is Hugo, a.k.a. "Souper" (Jason Schwartzman), who has bought the mansion and named it Mountainhead ("Who was your decorator, Ayn Bland?") despite having a net worth merely in the hundreds of millions as opposed to the others' billions. Acting as self-styled "Papa Bear" to these horrible young men is their mentor and investor, Randall (Steve Carell), himself insulated from humanity by his immense wealth and connections. "The great thing about me is that I know everyone, and I can do everything," Randall says at one point, and it's not bragging if it's true. Unfortunately, as we learn at the film's start, he has terminal cancer, a fact he's refusing to accept so long as the promise exists of downloading his existence to the internet. "You're first in line," Venis assures him. "We've just got to do a mouse, a pig, 10 morons, then you're the first brain on the grid." I could spend the rest of this review quoting the dialogue, so precisely does Armstrong eviscerate the pretensions and delusions of America's techno-elite. (A particular favorite: "Have these olives been pre-pitted? That means some greasy little monster from Whole Foods has had his fingers in them, and I don't like that.") As evening draws near and the world's capitols keep burning, the debate turns to whether it's time for these masters of the universe to take charge. "Do we take over a couple of falling nations and show how it's done?" "We could probably buy Haiti." As long as "Mountainhead" is cooking along like this, it's a smart, if stagy, satire along the lines of "Wag the Dog" -- exaggerated for comic effect but truthful enough to sting. Sadly, Armstrong never figures out how to wrap things up. "Mountainhead" takes a turn for the potentially violent and definitely absurd when some members of the group start turning against others and the film becomes an antic, increasingly untenable farce. I can say no more, but it's a shame; a black comedy that addresses viewers' very real fears about where the lords of technocracy are taking us turns inward, evaporating satire into slapstick. Watch it for the performances, then. Carell dials down his likability to play Randall as a breathtakingly casual monstrosity; Youssef slyly convinces us that Jeff may (or may not) have something like a conscience; Schwartzman is a neurotic fusspot as the zeta dog of this bunch; and Smith makes Venis a figure for our times, an uber-bro so convinced of his superiority that his sanity departed several CPU cycles ago. "Do you believe in other people?" Venis asks Randall. For him, it's an honest question. Unrated. Available at 8 p.m. Saturday on Max. Contains language and some violence. 109 minutes. Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

'Mountainhead' skewers the tech elite -- and it's very satisfying

'Succession' creator's new moguls are tech gods gazing down from 'Mountainhead' The action unfolds at the titular mountain mansion newly built by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), a millionaire hundreds of times over who is trying to figure out how to take his meditation app to the next level. Hugo -- whose friends call him "Souper" for reasons that will be uncovered -- has invited three billionaire buddies for what's ostensibly a poker weekend: Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a social media titan casually referenced as the richest man in the world; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rival to Venis with a powerful AI company; and Randy (Steve Carell), a venture capitalist who has just received some bad health news that he has decided not to believe. As the men arrive at Mountainhead, they see online that the new generative AI features in Venis' social media app have led to global mass violence as fake videos bait people into conflict and panic. Economies are beginning to collapse. As all four men take in the potential downfall of civilization on their phones, they're not sure how worried to be. Jeff is against all the death and suffering, but he also sees opportunity. See, Jeff's AI technology has the ability to distinguish truth from fiction, meaning he has the cure to the disease Ven has unleashed. Ven wants to buy his company, but Jeff isn't inclined to sell. After all, the more desperate the world grows, the more valuable Jeff's product might become. For him, it makes sense to get as close to the apocalypse as possible before he cashes in. While the four men at Mountainhead are targets of Armstrong's withering stink-eye for their amoral, antisocial approaches to the world -- less fiddling while Rome burns than doing molly and scheming to corner the market on fire extinguishers -- the stake he drives through their hearts is how unremarkable they are in every way except that they are rich. Hugo is a grasping coward. Venis is a vain, foolish, unloved dweeb who is probably also a sociopath. Randy is a bloviating, self-important tangle of resentments who fancies himself an intellectual but believes immortality is five years away and can't boil an egg. Playing Jeff, Youssef is the only one of these actors whose natural charisma is allowed to fly free. Jeff is, if you will, the Roman Roy of this enterprise -- the character who is obviously also a terrible person, but whose capacity for humor keeps making you wish he weren't. And even he, in the end, is an insecure and awkward poser who couldn't read a room with a book light and a magnifying glass. Perhaps it's unsurprising that in the hands of a terrific writer of comedy, a terrible sense of humor marks characters as untrustworthy and dull. In the opening moments of the film, Ven is in a big SUV with a couple of his lead sycophants, and he chuckles at the fact that he posted about his product launch with one word -- "F***" -- but he accidentally spelled it with two u's. He thinks it's hilarious that he wrote it with two u's, and the members of his team say they agree. He should leave it like that, they all say. It's hilarious. Two u's! Ven is blissfully unaware -- and he probably wouldn't care -- that everyone is lying to him, just as he is later blissfully unaware that everyone at Mountainhead is talking behind his back about how weird he's getting as the worldwide chaos expands and the pressure on him to stop it grows. Ven, Randy and Hugo are all devoid of wit at an atomic level, greedily slurping up cursory chuckles at their shriveled one-liners. They sometimes take a smidgen of true pleasure in cruelty or vulgarity, or in the fact that being trapped with people who believe it's financially advantageous to laugh at their jokes is the closest thing they experience to friendship. But they have no charm, only money. Armstrong is pitch-perfect at writing weak jokes for great comic actors so that, for instance, Steve Carell is very funny even though Randy is hopelessly, painfully not. More than once, you may find yourself thinking that Randy, minus his money, is a close relative of Michael Scott. Eventually, a divide between Jeff and the other three men forms and then deepens, mostly because Ven is angry at Jeff for not selling to him, and Randy and Hugo are attached to Ven like parasites desperate to get promoted from barnacle to tapeworm. This divide takes a dark turn that sends the whole thing into farce and slapstick, as it turns out that these particular masters of the universe, for all their bravado, wouldn't have the fortitude to push over a trash can without outsourcing it to an underpaid permatemp. At times, Mountainhead's bleakness will take your breath away. The dangers of losing our hold on reality come to the forefront both because of the central storyline about AI and because these men are so fully cleaved from the rest of humanity that they might as well already be living on Mars the way they dream of doing. During one conversation, Ven asks Randy, "Do you believe in other people?" He isn't asking whether Randy believes in the goodness of other people, or whether he trusts other people. He's asking whether Randy believes in other people -- skeptically questioning that there can really be "eight billion people as real as us." The tentacles of a quasi-spiritual denial of reality already are wrapped around Ven's ankles, and that's part of why he takes in scenes of death and destruction on the internet with a shrug. When he says those scenes on his app aren't real, he means the videos might be AI. But he also seems to mean that those things aren't real, because they aren't happening to him. They're happening to 8 billion other human beings who are such abstractions that he's beginning to think they don't exist, or at least they don't exist in the same way he does. There might be hope that Ven will get better at some point, but the keenest observation in Mountainhead is that all of these men pose the same threat, which is that as the world changes rapidly and their power expands exponentially, they never learn anything. They can't. They can't learn from experiencing consequences, because their money means they never do. They can't learn from other people, because nobody they listen to is willing to tell them the truth. They can't learn from history, because they believe they belong to a special class of superhumans to whom the rules of history do not apply. And traditional learning has been a bust: Even though they are superficially educated, these guys possess no insight. Randy loves to cite tidbits of history and philosophy, but he doesn't understand any of them. On the one hand, Mountainhead is just a despairing wail into the sky. After all, however foolish they may be, however little they know, these guys have the power they have and the money they have and the attendant ability to do harm, and there are no obvious solutions to that (other than perhaps a well-timed avalanche). Their world is stuck with them. On the other, watching a writer as skilled as Armstrong create these characters with such queasy believability and then poke them in the eye over and over again for almost two hours is profoundly pleasurable. After all, the point of "The Emperor's New Clothes" was less that it's shameful to be naked and more that it's shameful -- and funny -- to be a dope. It may not be obvious how to take power back from people who shouldn't have it, but the least we can do, Armstrong demonstrates, is to see them for what they are with clear eyes, and to refuse to pretend they are anything else.

'Succession' creator's new moguls are tech gods gazing down from 'Mountainhead'

Jesse Armstrong has been thinking a lot about billionaires. The creator of HBO's Succession has written and directed a new movie -- Mountainhead -- about four uber-rich leaders of tech. They've assembled at a mountaintop chateau for what's supposed to be a weekend of poker and conversation -- an "intellectual salon," as Jason Schwartzman's character Hugo Van Yalk puts it. Meanwhile, the world below them is falling into chaos. They watch news reports of mass executions, governments toppling -- all because one of them, Venis, owns a social networking company that's made sharing deep-fake videos very easy. As Venis's rival, Jeff, puts it: "Now you've inflamed a volatile situation, and people are using generative AI to circulate hyper-personalized messages, unfalsifiable deep-fakes... promoting genocidal proximate attacks, creating sectarian division with video evidence, massive market instability, fraud!" The question at the heart of Mountainhead is this: What do these tech gods do about the carnage while watching from their Mount Olympus? As Jesse Armstrong told Morning Edition host A Martínez, "When you're on yachts and in private jets and in gated communities, you are physically removed from your fellow human beings. That has a psychological effect, I think." Armstrong says the central relationship in the film is between Venis (played by Cory Michael Smith) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who's developed an AI application that might solve Venis's problem. But Jeff is being coy about whether or not they'll partner up. "On one level," Armstrong said, "he's the worst in that he could help stop the worst things that are happening in the world if he was to cooperate. Now, whether Jeff trusts Venis is a question. He is unwilling just to roll the dice in the hope that his friend will act in a way that's beneficial to humanity." The patriarch of the group is Randall (Steve Carell), a venture capitalist who's guided them to their wealth. As they consider solutions to the crisis, they're also considering ways they can take financial advantage of the situation. At one point, Randall says, "That's why I'm so excited about these atrocities!" "There's a spectrum of behaviors," Armstrong said of his four main characters. "On one end, you have confidence, which is probably a positive quality one needs to get through life. And the extreme version of that is arrogance. Where each of them falls on that spectrum, the viewer can decide -- but they think they have the solutions and they would like to apply them to the world. That requires a great degree of confidence. And maybe you see when that confidence tips over into arrogance in this film." Armstrong likens that extreme confidence to some of today's real-life tech leaders. "They are at a frontier of knowledge which is shaping our world, and they rightly think that they know more about that on the whole than we do. So the level of trust that we're being asked to put in them is enormous... We really have got nothing to do other than hope that these people, to some degree, have the rest of humanity's best interests in mind."

'Mountainhead' review: 'Succession' creator Jesse Armstrong brings your worst tech nightmares to life

Like Succession, Mountainhead turns its gaze on the rich and powerful, this time satirizing tech moguls in the vein of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman. The film mimics Succession formally, too, boasting its documentary-style cinematography, as well as a thrumming score from Succession composer Nicholas Britell. And of course, it comes with its fair share of WTF-worthy turns of phrase. (Ever heard the phrase "room cuck"? Well, now you won't be able to forget it.) But with all these similarities to Succession, Mountainhead often fails to escape that show's shadow, even as it tries to touch on current events in a way that sets it apart. In a plot that feels ripped right from the headlines, Mountainhead follows the "Brewsters," a group of four uber-wealthy tech bros whose poker night gets derailed by global unrest. Among them is the richest man in the world, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), who is the founder of social media platform Traam. As Mountainhead begins, Traam has just launched a new suite of AI tools capable of creating hyper-realistic deepfake images and videos. The ensuing wave of misinformation causes violence and financial instability worldwide, none of which Venis wants to take any accountability for. Instead, Venis hopes to acquire tech from fellow poker night attendee Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who has created a filter capable of distinguishing AI from reality. Yet Jeff is hesitant to sell, both because Traam is a "racist and shitty" platform, and because his net worth is skyrocketing in the face of all the chaos. Overseeing the Venis-Jeff standoff are Randall (Steve Carell), a "dark money Gandalf" who's also the "Papa Bear" of the group, and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), nicknamed Soup Kitchen by the others because he's the only non-billionaire of the group. Just a paltry millionaire! Hugo's massive Utah mansion -- named Mountainhead after Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, because of course a millionaire would pull that move -- becomes the perch from which Mountainhead's Brewsters watch the world fall apart. There, isolated from everyone, they begin to dream up ways to take further advantage of global pandemonium, and maybe even take the world for themselves. If Mountainhead's tale of tech billionaires seeking an even bigger piece of the world's pie comes across as eerily relevant, that's by design. Armstrong developed, wrote, and shot Mountainhead over a span of mere months in order to create a film that speaks as much to the present moment as possible. The effect is sobering, with Armstrong expertly stoking the flames of AI anxieties. Here, AI isn't just being used to create fake Katy Perry Met Gala looks or bizarro baby videos. Instead, it's prompting international conflict in what feels like the inevitable endpoint of the technology. Engineering it all are the Brewsters, who read like an amalgam of several key tech figures -- Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, and even Sam Bankman-Fried. Musk especially looms large. Characters' plans to rework the U.S. government are reminiscent of Musk's involvement in the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), although he stepped down on May 29. Elsewhere, Venis and Randall's obsession with transhumanism calls to mind Musk's Neuralink ambitions, while their assertion that Earth was a good "starter planet" gestures out to Musk's work on SpaceX and hopes to colonize Mars. On top of highlighting the kinds of ideas and technologies that make Silicon Valley tick right now, Armstrong also captures the self-aggrandizing patter of tech bro speak. From references to Plato and Kant to questions of "first principles," Carell, Schwartzman, Youssef, and Smith make a meal out of every smarmy line. After five seconds with each of them, you'll be itching to punch their lights out -- and that feeling only intensifies at the film's runtime ticks by. Yet for all it gets right about insufferable tech figures, Mountainhead falters when it comes to much of its actual dialogue and character work, two things Succession consistently excelled at. Early sequences feature ridiculously clunky exchanges laying the film's tech-heavy groundwork, including one monologue from Jeff that presents every single possible problem with Traam's AI in painstaking detail. No one, not even Youssef (otherwise hilarious in the film) can make that info dump sound natural. That same sense of clunky awkwardness permeates Mountainhead's first act as the characters (and the performers) get into the groove. While Hugo's guests settle in, their non-stop tech speak and volleys of insults feel like what you'd get if you pushed Succession just off its rhythm. Thankfully, Mountainhead truly finds its footing in its third act, which shifts focus from the Brewsters' reactions to the outside world to a more internal, immediate conflict. To say much more would be to spoil Mountainhead's most delicious surprises, but the film's jump into an absurdist crime caper is a welcome shot in the arm -- and the jolt Mountainhead needs to step away from the Succession comparisons (even if they come roaring back in the movie's final minutes). Mountainhead's quick turnaround time makes it a fascinating experiment in and of itself: How feasible is it to create a movie that's so steeped in current events that it won't feel dated or overdone by the time it comes out? But in the end, it's not the barrage of references to AI and other tech that stick in the head. Instead, it's that last, more contained section that proves to be the most fascinating part of our trip up to Mountainhead, as well as the most salient commentary on tech moguls the film has to offer.

Tech-bro satire Mountainhead is an insufferable disappointment

Picture this: a group of very rich people gather at an ostentatiously large, secluded retreat. The SUVs are black, tinted, sleek. The jets are private. The egos are large, the staff sprawling and mostly unseen, the decor both sterile and unimaginably expensive. This is the distinctive milieu of Succession, the HBO juggernaut which turned the pitiful exploits of a bunch of media mogul failsons into Shakespearean drama for four critically acclaimed seasons. It is also the now familiar aesthetic of a range of eat-the-rich satires plumbing our oligarchic times for heady ridicule, if increasingly futile insight - The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out: Glass Onion, Parasite, The White Lotus and the recent A24 disappointment Death of a Unicorn to name a few. (That's not to mention countless mediocre shows on the foibles of the wealthy, such as this month's The Better Sister and Sirens.) So suffice to say, I approached Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong's first post-series project about four tech billionaire friends gathering for poker as one's AI innovation wreaks havoc on the globe, with a sense of pre-existing fatigue. The market of ultra-rich satire is, to use the logic of Armstrong's characters, saturated. (Or, to use their language: "I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.") There's more than a whiff of Argestes, the second-season Succession episode at a billionaire mountain retreat, to these shots of private cars pulling up to a huge chalet hugged by snowcapped peaks. And though Armstrong, who solely wrote and directed the film, continues his avoidance of easy one-to-ones, there's more than a whiff of Elon Musk to Venis (Cory Michael Smith), an AI company CEO and the richest person in the world with a tenuous grasp on reality, a stupendous sense of nihilism and unrepentant need to assert his own virility (the landscape, he notes, is "so beautiful you can fuck it"). In some ways, it's a relief to see tech bros, especially AI entrepreneurs, reach full, unambiguous movie-villain status. Already, there is a competently made movie for the Doge era, and Armstrong, as ever, can nail hairpin turns of phrase on the sentence level. But as much as I hate to contribute to the "anti anti-rich content" discourse, on which much ink has already been spilled, I can't say Mountainhead refuted any expectations of reality fatigue; watching Venis, host Soup (Jason Schwartzman, playing the least rich of the group, and thus nicknamed after a soup kitchen), Marc Andreessen-esque venture capitalist Randall (a miscast Steve Carell), and fellow AI wunderkind Jeff (Ramy Youssef) brainstorm plans for the post-human future as more of a slog than if I were high-altitude hiking with them. To be honest, I'm not sure any classic satire - as in, using irony or exaggeration to highlight hypocrisies, vices and stupidity - could work for the second Trump administration, at once dumber and more destructive than the first, nor the release of generative AI on the public. Both require a level of hypernormalization and devaluing of reality that make the idea of enlightening ridiculousness feel, well, ridiculous. Even the most inventive writers and performers will struggle to craft humor out of beyond farcical political figures and norms degraded beyond recognition (see: Mark Ruffalo's effete and grating parody of Trump in Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17). Succession, which ran from 2018 to 2023, soared on its "ludicrosity", to borrow a made-up term from its billionaire patriarch Logan Roy, with a precise critical distance from reality. The deeply cynical, psychically fragile, acid-tongued media conglomerate family loosely based on the Murdochs were just far enough removed from the real Fox News timeline. Its inverted morals, barren decadence and high irony the right angle of fun-house mirror to become, in my view, the defining show of the Trump era, without ever mentioning his name. But we are in a different era now, and the same tools feel too blunt to meet it. Mountainhead shares much of the same DNA as Succession, from Armstrong to producers to crew, to trademark euphemisms (why say "murdered" when you can say "placeholdered"?) It was completed on an extraordinarily fast timeline - pitched in December 2024, written (partly in the back of cars while scouting locations) this winter, filmed in Park City in March and released by end of May - giving it the feel of a streaming experiment for the second, more transparently oligarchic Trump term. How fast can you make an HBO movie? How can you satirize current events moving at a speed too fast for any ordinary citizen to keep up, let alone be reasonably informed? "The way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall," Youssef told the Atlantic, and it shows. Mountainhead plays out less like a drama between four tenuously connected, very rich friends, and more like a random word generator of tech and finance bro jargon - decel (deceleration, as in AI), p(doom) (the probability of an AI apocalypse), first principles. (Armstrong, by his own admission, binged episodes of the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Trump's AI/crypto czar David Sacks.) The backgroup of this billionaire conclave are series of escalating crises from Venis's guardrail-less AI that feel themselves AI generated - women and children burned alive in a mosque, a deluge of deepfakes that imperils governments in Armenia, Uzbekistan, Japan, Ohio. Italy defaults on its debt. Should they take over Argentina? Buy Haiti? "Are we the bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?" The deluge of contextless, characterless chaos - Succession's Kendall would call this dialogue "complicated airflow" - succeeds in highlighting the depersonalizing effect of Silicon Valley's many innovations. None of this feels real, because none of this is real to these characters. Millions of No Real Persons Involved. But that is undercut by a pervasive sense of self-importance. Like the irksome climate-change satire Don't Look Up, directed by Succession executive producer Adam McKay, the exaggerated hijinks of Mountainhead reveal a deep self-assurance of its politics that border on smug. It's not that it doesn't, like Succession, attempt to humanize these figures - each billionaire has an Achilles heel of morality or mortality, though by now the fallibility of Musk-like figures is far from a revelation. It's that the drama between these billionaires felt frictionless - mostly unchallenged by secondary figures and impervious to other perspectives, at once predictable and insufferable to watch. Every human has their unique foibles and contradictions, but Mountainhead found itself too enthralled by figures who are no longer interesting, if they ever were. I found myself longing for more than two minutes with the girlfriend, the ex-wife, the assistant, the board member, let alone one of the many staff at the house - anyone to de-center a perspective that has already claimed far too much oxygen in the public sphere. For a Real Person to get involved. But that may be beyond this flavor of satire, now in an era of diminishing returns.

The New Movie From the Creator of Succession Is Less a Satire Than a Documentary

Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? For the quartet of tech billionaires in Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead, ideas are so powerful that nothing else seems real. Holed up in a resplendent snowy retreat built by meditation-app developer Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), they're glued to their phones as the outside world is erupting into chaos, thanks in no small part to the wildfire spread of A.I. deepfakes on the social media platform owned by the world's richest man, Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith). People in Gujarat are being burned alive after being falsely accused of desecrating religious symbols, and Midwestern Americans are machine-gunning each other over minor disagreements, but for these four men, the widespread devastation is in some ways proof of concept that they're as important as they believe themselves to be. And besides, those bodies going up in flames are just images on a tiny screen, so distant they might as well be theoretical. As he trudges through the snow with Randall (Steve Carell), the venture capitalist who serves as the group's self-appointed philosopher king, Venis asks him, "Do you ... believe in other people?" Although Armstrong is best known as the creator of Succession, Mountainhead, which premieres on HBO on Saturday, leans toward his origins in the acidic comedy of The Thick of It and the narcissistic grotesquerie of Peep Show. There's no Shakespearean drama here, just a group of delusional maniacs who also happen to be some of the most powerful people in the world. Venis' social media platform Traam boasts 4 billion users, and his rival Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has developed a powerful A.I. called Bilter that can separate even the most sophisticated of digital fakes from the real thing -- he calls it "the cure for info cancer." That technology would come in especially handy in a world that's rapidly devolving into chaos because of Traam's reckless deployment of generative A.I. tools that allow every user to produce their own instant fake news. But there's bad blood between them because Venis said something disparaging about Jeff on a podcast, and besides, the worse things get, the more valuable Jeff's technology becomes. On their one outing from the house where the movie is set, the foursome, who call themselves the Brewsters, hike to the top of a mountain and scrawl their net worths on their bare chests: Venis is first, followed by Randall, then Jeff, and finally Hugo, who, at a measly $500 million, is so comparatively impoverished that the others call him "Souper," derived from "soup kitchen." But in the middle of the gathering, Jeff's net worth vaults past Randall's, and the older man practically goes feral. Sure, the numbers are only theoretical. But theories are all they have. Armstrong told me that one source of inspiration for Mountainhead came from the podcasts he binged while researching Succession's tech storyline, and the movie has the vibe of four would-be alpha males fighting over the same microphone, rattling off jargon about transhumanism and four-sigma IQs. It plays like a gonzo satire of Silicon Valley self-talk, except that every time you pause to Google some absurd term or another, it turns out to be real. Like Succession's not-quite-Murdochs, the movie's characters are all transparently inspired by actual people: Venis, with his pharmaceutical exuberance and lust for getting humanity "off planet," is Elon Musk with a social media network that's closer in size to Mark Zuckerberg's; Randall, who cites Hegel and Marcus Aurelius without fully grasping their ideas, is Peter Thiel; Jeff, the A.I. whiz who has enough of a conscience to express remorse but not enough to override his competitive drive, is like a combination of the Sams Altman and Bankman-Fried. (Hugo, who keeps trying to insist that his cash-burning meditation business is actually a "lifestyle super-app," could be any wannabe who's wildly rich by any standard except the one he's chosen to hold himself to.) The collateral damage of Traam's hands-off approach to disinformation barely exaggerates the destruction wrought by Facebook in Myanmar or WhatsApp in India, and as Musk's impending exit from the White House spawns a flood of leaks about the drugs he was allegedly mainlining while ripping the wires out of the federal government, the movie starts to feel less like Dr. Strangelove and more like Last Week Tonight. For all its absurdist touches, Mountainhead hits hardest -- and, not to put too fine a point on it, harder than just about any movie released in theaters this year -- when it's more quietly observant. The way Hugo casually leans against a painting in his newly furbished mansion speaks volumes about the tech world's relationship to art, and when Randall and Jeff compare their biometric data -- "I've got a sleep score of 80" -- you don't need to be told that they've gamified everything in their lives, because that's the only way to know who's won. (Randall doesn't tell the others that the illness he has been fighting has recently been pronounced terminal, insisting instead that, for him, "cancer was net-net a big positive.") Smith, who after playing Chevy Chase in Saturday Night is quickly cornering the market on smug assholes, perfectly captures tech evangelists' messianic disregard for the lives of mere humans, insisting that the way through the catastrophic consequences of his deepfake generator is simply to "show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that fuckin' serious." The movie feels at first like a broad-stroke caricature, but the longer you inhabit these characters' headspace, the clearer it becomes how much we're already living in the world they've made, except that for us, the theories aren't just theories. They dream the dreams, and we suffer the realities.

The Creator of Succession Is Back With a Movie. There's a Reason He Rushed to Make It Right Away.

Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? Outside an opulent retreat in the mountains of Utah, the world is going to hell. Thanks to disinformation-spreading tools on the world's largest social media platform, people are being executed by bloodthirsty mobs and machine-gunned by their neighbors, politicians assassinated and governments crumbling. But inside Mountainhead, the billionaire tech moguls responsible for the chaos are smoking cigars and shooting the breeze, debating whether the eruption of global chaos is a crisis to be managed or a surge of "creative destruction" that will help usher humanity into a brighter future. If the fictional setting of Mountainhead, the debut feature by Jesse Armstrong, seems a little too close to reality, that's because it's meant to be. The movie, which stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith, was conceived, written, cast, shot, edited, and released in about six months, an astonishingly short timeline for any director, let alone a first-timer. But then Armstrong, who is also the creator of Succession, isn't exactly new to the process, or to stories that put a light spin on the already-absurd excesses of 21-century capitalism. If Succession was about an old-media dynasty losing its footing in a rapidly technologizing world, Mountainhead is about the world that replaced them, one where it's possible to be plugged in and utterly disconnected at the same time. As the movie begins, Smith's character, who's roughly a 70-30 amalgam of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, has just enabled a suite of generative A.I. tools on his social media platform that allow its 4 billion users to create and disseminate undetectable deepfakes, leading to an immediate outbreak of sectarian violence across the world. Youssef's rival mogul has developed an A.I. that could immediately separate the truth from the lies, but he's reluctant to bail a competitor out of the hole he's dug for himself, or at least not while the mayhem keeps sending his stock climbing. So he and the others, including Carell's Hegel-spouting venture capitalist and Schwartzman's lifestyle-app developer -- the gathering's poor relation, with a net worth of a mere $500 million -- just stay glued to their phones, watching the world self-immolate while they debate which demolished country would be easiest for them to purchase after the killing stops. (Haiti, maybe?) As Succession viewers might expect, the result is both sobering and riotously comic. The tech bros engage in petty one-upmanship and douse each other in gibberish about interplanetary colonization and going transhuman, while somewhere on the other side of the world people are dying en masse. And the scenes in which Smith's character attempts to brush off an urgent phone call from "the prez" -- "he's just an arrangement of carbon, you know?" -- hit even harder now than they did when I talked to Armstrong during a stop in New York last week. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sam Adams: You made Mountainhead incredibly quickly -- you got the idea in November, shot in March, and now you're premiering at the end of May. There are a few ways that I could phrase this question, but the most honest is: Why would you do that to yourself? Jesse Armstrong: What's the honest answer? I pitched it to Casey from HBO, Casey Bloys, in December. I hadn't written it, obviously. I wanted it, ideally, to come out in the same mental, geopolitical tech space as I was writing it, which meant, I guess, under six months. Casey and HBO had their schedule, their shape of the year and when stuff comes out. So it made sense for him too, and he was eager to make it work on this contracted timeline. Also, there was a little bit of fear. It was my first time directing, and I was anxious about that, and I knew that if I had tons of time, I would spend it trying to watch every YouTube tutorial about how to make a film and read every book with directors talking about their first filmmaking mistakes. I felt, in a way, since I knew the appropriate way to shoot this was something pretty similar to Succession -- two cameras, loose style -- I felt like: Listen, maybe I should just run at it and not have enough time. I won't even have time to watch one YouTube tutorial on how to make a film, because I'll be going at such a pace to write and cast this thing to hit the deadline. I quite like the feeling of being pushed out of the plane door rather than having a lot of time to linger and check my parachute. Given the subject matter and the timeline of Mountainhead, is it fair to say that Elon Musk's involvement in the 2024 election was a starting place for you? I'm thinking back now. I don't think it was clear in November. Certainly DOGE was not ... We didn't know, did we? Not exactly. It wasn't, really -- and I'm not being coy. Certainly, seeing all the tech CEOs at the inauguration was very salutary, and the DOGE project, which has almost come and gone within the time span of the production of the movie, definitely infects the world. But that wasn't the specific impulse. The germ of the idea was from reading Michael Lewis' Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried. I wrote a review of it somewhere, and that kicked me back to a bunch of research that we'd started doing when we did the Matsson character, [Alexander] Skarsgård's character, on Succession. I started reading a bunch of tech stuff, and I started particularly listening to podcasts and hearing those voices. The Redstones, Murdochs, Maxwells, it wasn't part of their thing, really, to create a narrative in the mainstream culture. For Zuck and for Elon, for all those tech guys, they all have a story to tell, and it's part of their modus operandi to be storytellers in public about their own companies. The voices were just available, and for lots of writers, novelists as well, finding the voice of the piece is the thing. It's a long way 'round of saying the voices were the thing which I couldn't stop thinking about. The plot is a receptacle to put those voices into. People are going to watch Mountainhead and think you're exaggerating the way these people talk, but a sentence like "He's a decel with crazy P(doom) and zero risk tolerance" is at least based in fact, even if I had to go back to Slate's tech coverage to figure out some of those words. Is that a problem for a satirist? What do you do when reality is already so far beyond most people's imagining? I think that's just a challenge for if you're in the so-called satire world space. But as you say, it doesn't matter; that sentence, the cadence of it, I find pleasing. Maybe it would be cool to invent that. Personally, I prefer not to invent. Sometimes you coin things which feel real, but I've always much preferred for it to be the real language, so that if your colleague or somebody in tech is watching this, it feels like we've done our research, which I hope we have. I like that bit. I don't buy the idea that the world's so hyper or so extreme that you can't satirize it. Maybe it's too aggressive to say it's an excuse, but you've just got to find your angle of attack. The world changes, the old angles don't work anymore, you've got to find a new approach. I think that goes with the territory. You can't still be making the British satirical series That Was the Week That Was, from the '60s. Saturday Night Live, they have to find a new way in every week, and so do pieces in the sort of space that I occupy as well. You mentioned the GoJo storyline on Succession, which obviously covers the same territory as Mountainhead. But were there places you could go with this story that you couldn't when you had a responsibility to preestablished characters and a four-season narrative? I had a discussion with myself early on about whether it would be cool for this to be a Succession-related story, or would that make the audience more interested if it was? It tonally is, I think, a distinct space, and I loved it being a stand-alone. I would always tell the writers room for Succession, "Burn the fuel, don't hold anything back. The time to do it is now." But there is a bit of your brain which knows there are things that people can say to each other or do to each other from which it is almost impossible to come back. Not having any of those considerations, yeah, I did find liberating. Mountainhead reminded me a little bit of the jump from the British TV series The Thick of It to the movie In the Loop -- both of which you wrote on with Armando Iannucci -- in the sense that one is about the relatively small stakes of British politics, and in the other the environment is basically the same, but the stakes change dramatically by virtue of shifting the action to the U.S. It's the same incompetence and petty squabbling, but now it's starting wars and people are dying. Succession sometimes hints at the broader repercussions of the Roys' manipulations, but here we see that the things these characters have created are causing massacres and destabilizing entire countries. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I think you're dead right. With In the Loop, it was important that it was a distinct world, because I think Armando knew that if you had just taken those [Thick of It] characters, there would've been an uncomfortable disjuncture between the tones. Even late in the edit of Mountainhead, we were like, "Would it be fun to have an ATN slug on one of these news reports?" It's like, No, this is not that world. In my opinion, and I'm always happy for everyone else to have their own opinion, this film is more comic, probably, line by line, than Succession, but it is rather darker in geopolitical terms. The characters in Mountainhead have some pretty nutso ideas about relocating to Mars and "going transhuman" and so forth -- which, again, are all drawn, without much modification, from real life. As you dug into that world during your research, were there any particularly surprising beliefs you encountered? I guess it started off a little bit with Sam Bankman-Fried, the philosophical approach of lots of them -- and I think Musk said it's a close fit for his approach -- this "effective altruism," which I have a lot of time for, because it's people trying to do the right thing, which is appealing to me. What is funny is, because of the philosophical approach -- first principles, no barriers on what we're thinking -- some of the thinkers end up going in eccentric directions and thinking mainly about the application to future generations. Suddenly, there's this compound-interest, multiplying effect, where the moment you live in now becomes almost irrelevant compared to the amount of people who will be affected in the future, and maybe theoretically, if you count all those lives as the same as the ones who are alive now, the present moment becomes insignificant. You get these weird distortions from very clear philosophical approaches. I guess you can see what happens when that gets applied to one individual in this film, and you can end up in a morally inverted world. How clear thinking can end up in morally extreme places, that appeals to me. I like following arguments to their logical conclusions. Or illogical conclusions. This isn't a movie that ends with a website you can visit to make things all better, but if you could stand on a hill and ring the alarm bell for one particular aspect of the tech takeover of society, what seems like the most dangerous thing going on here? That's not my territory. If we were in the pub, as we'd say in the U.K., I think I could give you my pitch, but in a way, my pitch wouldn't be any better than yours. It'd probably be worse, given your background and publication. I am not in that territory in the film. No bell ringing. Let me ask you specifically about generative A.I., then, which plays a key role in setting the world on fire in Mountainhead. Are you someone who believes there's a good use case for the technology, or is this just a big light blinking red on humanity? I would signpost this part of the interview going into "Bloke down the pub chatting" rather than what's inherent in the movie. In the movie, I guess I would say that the expression of the dangers of generative A.I. and social media, it's a bunch of shit that could happen that I don't want the film to focus on too precisely, because that world is so fast-moving and so particular that I haven't got the expertise to say exactly what's going to happen. But there's a bunch of anxieties which are hopefully expressed within the film as a shape of stuff going wrong. In terms of my specifics, if we were in the pub talking about A.I., I feel like there's going to be no limit on it. Any limit you set on what it is going to be able to do -- "This is the game it'll never do" or "This is the part of creativity it will never exceed" -- will be exceeded. That's what everyone who works in the field seems to think. Maybe they'll be wrong, but I'd take them at their word, because it seems to have been right so far. What I do think is that I'm only interested in other human beings. Not only. I'm interested in reading one story written by an A.I. to see what it's like, and maybe I'll be interested once every five years to check in. But I want to know what you think about this film. I don't want to know what a response of a collection of all the other thoughts that have been ever thought in the world applied to it is. That's intriguing to look at once. I guess our only hope as creative people, and also human beings in general, is that we carry on really being interested in other people and what they think of our stuff and what we express as human beings, because you're going to be able to create a similar crumb of what a person thinks, a really good one and in lots of different tones. But that's pub talk rather than Mountainhead talk.

'Mountainhead' stars on the 'incredibly dangerous' mentality of their uber-rich characters

"Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong's new HBO film "Mountainhead" stars Jason Schwartzman in key role. "Mountainhead" stars Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef felt like they hit the jackpot as recruits for the first movie directed by "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong. After all, the HBO drama series, which centered on the children of media mogul Logan Roy fighting to take over his empire, earned 76 Emmy nominations throughout its four seasons. "When Jesse Armstrong reaches out, (you say yes)," says Schwartzman, 44. "Being such a massive fan of 'Succession' and his point of view ... you would do it even if you maybe didn't have any knowledge of what it was." Youssef, 34, thought "Jesse Armstrong? I'm in. Tech bro, hell, yeah." Smith, 38, counts "Succession" as "one of my favorite shows of all time. I watched that show salivating over what these other actors got to do, and this being an opportunity to work with him was just like no questions asked." But maybe you have questions, like what is "Mountainhead" about? The film, debuting May 31 (8 ET/PT on HBO and streaming on HBO Max), chronicles the weekend shenanigans of a (mostly) billionaire boys club gathered for poker at Hugo's (Schwartzman) modest 21,000-square-foot estate, dubbed Mountainhead. Hugo is the poorest of the four with a measly $521 million to his name. Venis (pronounced "Venice" and portrayed by Smith) is the richest with a $220 billion fortune amassed from his social media platform Traam, currently inundated with deepfakes so realistic they're inciting international incidents of violence. He's in dire need of Jeff's (Youssef) AI which can flag fake content for users. Randall (played by Steve Carell) is eager for Venis and Jeff to partner because it will increase the likelihood Randall can upload his consciousness before cancer overtakes his body. The movie filmed at breakneck speed over five weeks this spring in Park City, Utah. "It was so accelerated," Schwartzman says. "Part of being in the movie that was unspoken was like, 'Are you prepared to just give it all you can and no matter what, just put it on the line?' Doing that with these gentlemen, it was really inspiring and moving." The characters' desires and delusions about the world and themselves make for an interesting dynamic. "They respect each other, and they have an anti-respect for each other," Schwartzman says. "And it's hard to kind of figure out what is what and who's feeling what, but it's almost like these four guys need each other." The film looks at those who "have incredible authority and power over all of our lives," Smith says, asking, "What are they like behind the scenes? How much do they care? Are they nihilists and do they have any consideration for the well-being of all of us in the midst of political and economic turmoil around the world? I don't know." The tension of the film is "incredibly different than 'Succession,'" Youssef says. "Fans of Jesse are going to be happy, but it's a different thing." Armstrong's voice and style are apparent, and the characters "are powerful and deal with privilege and are rich," Youssef says. But "we're not looking at nepo babies. We're looking at actually self-made guys who view themselves as underdogs in a world where actually they are in more control than they should be. And that kind of cognitive dissonance is incredibly dangerous." Youssef, born to Egyptian parents, says he crafted his role of Jeff as someone with similar origins who struck it rich. "When you're after money, it is never enough," he says. "Everyone comes to that realization that what is going to really give you that feeling of wealth is going to be having a rich personal life, and this character doesn't have that. In my own personal life, it was a quick realization that you get a few things that you're hoping to get, and then once you get them, you go, 'OK, that's not really what I was after.'" Smith, who grew up in a working-class family, wanted to be a theater actor. Being rich was not the goal. "The thing that I really wanted when I decided to go to drama school and then moved to New York was to be able to support myself doing the thing that I loved," he says. "And when I accomplished that, being able to do that, that was like a crazy thing for me." The experience of working on "Mountainhead" is its own fortune, one which Smith gets choked up reflecting on. "Being invited onto this movie was so mind-blowing for me because 'Succession' is one of my favorite shows and getting a personal call from (Armstrong) offering me this job was just crazy, dreamy," Smith says. "For the four actors and Jesse and everyone else to also just be really kind, supportive, wonderful people ... making friends with these people is beyond."

Movie Review: A Tech Bro-Pocalypse in Jesse Armstrong's 'Mountainhead'

This image released by Max shows, from left, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman in a scene from "Mountainhead." (Max via AP) "Succession" fans rejoice. Jesse Armstrong has again gathered together a conclave of uber-wealthy megalomaniacs in a delicious satire. "Mountainhead," which the "Succession" creator wrote and directed, is a new made-for-HBO movie that leaves behind the backstabbing machinations of media moguls for the not-any-better power plays of tech billionaires. Or, at least, three billionaires. Their host for a poker weekend in the mountains at a sprawling estate named after Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" is Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), the solo member of the group not to reach, as they say, "B-nut" status. His net worth is a paltry $521 million. The others are three of the wealthiest men in the world. Randall (Steve Carell) is their senior, a kind of Steve Jobs-like mentor they all call "Papa Bear." Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who runs the world's leading AI company, calls Randall the "Dark Money Gandalf." Lastly, but maybe most notably, is Venis (Cory Michael Smith), whose social media platform boasts 4 billion users globally. But the latest update to Venis' platform, named Traam, is causing havoc. As the four gather at Hugo's isolated perch in the Utah mountains, news reports describe violence sweeping across Asia due to an outbreak of deepfakes on Traam that have wrecked any sense of reality. Yet what's real for this quartet of digital oligarchs -- none of whom has a seemingly direct real-life corollary, all of whom are immediately recognizable -- is more to the point of "Mountainhead," a frightfully credible comedy about the delusions of tech utopianism. Each of the four, with the exception of some hesitancy on the part of Jeff, are zealous futurists. On the way to Mountainhead, a doctor gives Randall a fatal diagnosis that he outright refuses. "All the things we can do and we can't fix one tiny little piece of gristle in me?" But together, in Armstrong's dense, highly quotable dialogue, their arrogance reaches hysterical proportions. While the cast is altogether excellent, this is most true with Smith's Venis, a tech bro to end all tech bros. As the news around the world gets worse and worse, his certainty doesn't waver. Earth, itself, no longer hold much interest for him. "I just want to get us transhuman!" he shouts. Progress (along with net worth) is their cause, and much of the farce of "Mountainhead" derives from just how much any semblance of compassion for humanity has left the building. It's in the way Venis blanches at the mention of his baby son. It's in the way, as death counts escalate in the news on their phones, they toy with world politics like kids at a Risk board. In one perfectly concise moment, Venis asks, sincerely, "Do you believe in other people?" If "Succession" filtered its media satire through family relationships, "Mountainhead" runs on the dynamics of bro-styled male friendship. There are beefs, hug-it-out moments, passive-aggressive put downs and eruptions of anger. Part of the fun of Armstrong's film isn't just how their behavior spills into a geopolitical events but how it manifests, for example, in which room everyone gets. All of "Mountainhead" unfolds in the one location, with white mountaintops stretching in the distance outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. It could be a play. Instead, though, it's something that either hardly exists anymore or, maybe, exists everywhere: the made-for-TV movie. There's no lack of films made for streaming services, but many of them fall into some in-between aesthetic that couldn't fill a big screen and feel a touch disposable on the small screen. But "Mountainhead" adheres to the tradition of the HBO movie; it's lean, topical and a fine platform for its actors. And for Armstrong, it's a way to keep pursuing some of the timely themes of "Succession" while dispensing lines like: "Coup-out the U.S.? That's a pretty big enchilada." "Mountainhead," an HBO Films release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 109 minutes. Three stars out of four. Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

How -- and Why -- Jesse Armstrong Assembled 'Mountainhead' So Quickly

What became Jesse Armstrong's first script since Succession started with a book review. In November 2023, the Succession creator wrote a review for the Times Literary Supplement of Going Infinite, Michael Lewis' book about disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried. The assignment led to "a bunch of reading ... about tech, AI, social media and ownership," Armstrong told The Hollywood Reporter, and that in turn took him to the world of Silicon Valley podcasting. "I started getting the tone of voice of Silicon Valley and the broader tech world in my ear," he said, "and the incredible confidence of pronouncements -- not just about tech, but starting to shade over into pronouncements about all sorts of different areas" stuck with him. "That voice became so persistent that it was like, I want to do this voice. And in a way, the voice came first, then the frame of this movie became apparent." The movie is Mountainhead, which premieres on HBO Saturday. The film stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef as tech moguls who gather for a guys' weekend at the mountaintop home of Schwartzman's character, Hugo "Souper" Van Yalk. As they do, though, a worldwide crisis erupts, caused in no small part by a set of AI tools that allow for super-convincing deepfake videos from the richest member of the quartet's (Smith) company. The four spend much of the movie debating what, if anything, to do about the escalating chaos and pondering whether they should, essentially, take over the world. Despite that bleak description, though, elements of dark comedy (and even farce) run through Mountainhead, similar to how Armstrong's Succession operated. The comic elements were actually necessary, Armstrong told THR: "The extremity of where [the characters] get to, I hope, feels like the same sort of unbalance that you can sometimes feel as you watch world events unfold right now." For such a high-profile project, Mountainhead came together remarkably quickly. HBO announced the film in January; the four leads signed on between then and the beginning of filming in March; and production wrapped in April, leaving less than two months for post-production. On top of all that, Mountainhead is Armstrong's first time directing a feature-length project. The speed of the production pretty well matched the public timeline, Armstrong said. He pitched the idea to HBO chief Casey Bloys in December 2024, then wrote the script in January. Most of the cast signed on before Armstrong finished the script, and the production time was short. Armstrong also wanted to get Mountainhead in front of viewers as quickly as possible for a couple of reasons. First, as he told THR at the movie's premiere on May 22, "When people see it, they'll realize it's about this world that we live in right now, and the tech world changes so quickly. I was keen to write it and for people to see it in the same sort of bubble of time." Armstrong also didn't want to give himself too much time to overthink things as he took on his first big directing assignment (he previously helmed two short films). "I knew that, in a way, the cure for my anxieties about [directing] was twofold," he said. "One was surrounding myself with a lot of people who had worked on Succession, so I felt really able to ask dumb questions and to lean on people who I trusted. And the other thing was maybe I'm never going to read enough interviews with other directors to insulate myself from all the mistakes I'm going to make. Maybe it's better just to run at it and dive in and learn as I go, surrounded by people who are going to protect me. ... I was just completely cocooned by people who I could say, 'Look, is this going to work? Is this OK? Have I done that right? Is that wrong? Tell me.' So that was my solution to that problem, rather than having longer preparation time."

Mountainhead Review - IGN

A tech bro satire that tells you what to feel instead of making you feel it. Directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, Mountainhead exists in the same "eat the rich" satirical mode as the hit HBO series but hits a wall at every turn. A contained, stage-like production, it follows the reunion of four tech industry leaders and rips its plot from contemporary headlines about deep fakes and AI. However, it doesn't engage with its characters, or its political material, beyond glancing blows. The result is a film that - despite its strong performances - constantly meanders, and feels distinctly malformed. In a lavish mountain mansion above Park City, Utah, tech up-and-comer Hugo (Jason Schwartzman) - aka "Souperman," or "Soups" - plays host to a gathering of his old friends, collectively known as the Brewsters. Eager to please, Hugo slots comfortably into the backdrop. Schwartzman is impressive at making himself feel small, though the flimsy writing leaves Hugo feeling like a vestigial tail, lacking any real purpose in the story. Schwartzman's co-leads, on the other hand, play immediately more well-rounded startup moguls, though this doesn't necessarily make their characters good fits for Mountainhead either. Corey Michael Smith plays Venis, a character who skillfully hides the way critical news headlines affect him. Before he even arrives at the snowy getaway, he learns that his social media website has platformed so much misinformation that it's led to violent outbursts worldwide (an allusion to Facebook's admission that its lack of moderation resulted in real-world violence in Myanmar), allowing Smith to capture a mounting pressure en route to a potential explosion. The oldest member of the closed circle is Randall - played by an intentionally distracted, disconnected Steve Carell - a successful investor whose secret illness shifts all his concerns towards uploading his consciousness to the Cloud (a technology still far in the future). And the fourth and final member of the group is Ramy Youssef's altruistic Jeff, an unexpected arrival - given the words he and Venis have indirectly exchanged in the media - whose AI company excels at separating fact from fiction, potentially holding the keys to Venis's problems. As the quartet catches up - exchanging profanity-laced barbs that struggle to be snappy or amusing - global news headlines pushed to their phones and broadcast on television hint at a growing financial crisis, owing to violent hate crimes in volatile regions and a slew of other causes that feel tossed into the mix at random. What's happening on the other side of characters' screens isn't as important as the impact it has on them - which is to say: their public image and their bottom lines. However, Mountainhead's alignment between how the characters see the world and how the camera presents it to us - Hugo's diminished importance, the half-baked news items, and so on - leads to a near-constant disconnect. In crafting a flimsy world outside the characters' windows, Armstrong seldom clarifies the impending domino effects for them, resulting in empty drama when they begin making rash decisions. Rather than letting the characters' thoughts, actions, and flagrant regulation-skirting speak for themselves, the mounting absurdity of their denial and desperate financial decisions is generally explained away in dialogue - as is the Randian significance of the title. Laying one's thematic cards on the table isn't inherently a bad thing, but in Mountainhead this usually takes the form of Jeff's moral sermonizing, as though he were an embodiment of the movie's conscience, directing us towards exactly how to feel about the unfolding turmoil. Any reaction shot that might've been given room to breathe (or to be awkwardly funny) instead finds its emotional pause filled with Jeff's didactic explanations of why the other characters are in the wrong. Beyond a point, it's hard to wonder why Jeff is even part of this story - both as a character who, in all likelihood, wouldn't associate with any of these people (or lead the kind of industry he does), and as a piece of the dramatic puzzle. It's hard to truly classify Mountainhead as a satire, given how much it over-explains itself. It's more of a straightforward PSA - but at least it has a fun musical score to prevent things from getting totally boring. Armstrong may be a prolific writer and television showrunner, but this is his first real directorial effort beyond two short films in the 2010s, and his inexperience shows. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind's camera may be loose and free-flowing, but the filmmaking lacks the energy and urgency needed to make a story like this one click. The drama rarely contains a sense of clashing perspectives, or any real shared history beyond a few allusions to Venis and Jeff's past disagreements. It plays, on the surface, like a late Succession episode in which existing tensions come to a head, only without the all robust pre-existing relationships to make the financial jargon interesting or the moral conundrums remotely challenging.

Mountainhead Actor Cory Michael Smith on How His Character is Like The Riddler - IGN

Plus Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef describe how Jesse Armstong's immersive set made them forget they weren't billionaires. It's been exactly two years since we said goodbye to Succession. Now, series creator Jesse Armstrong is back to fill that Waystar Royco-sized hole in your heart. Mountainhead, a new movie starring Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Jason Schwartzman, and Cory Michael Smith, hits HBO and Max this weekend. The film tells the story of four ultra-rich tech titans who huddle up for a luxe mountain weekend as the world reels from the AI-induced consequences of one of their creations. Smith portrays Venis, the Elon Musk-esque richest man in the world and head of the catastrophe-causing social platform in question. He says the immature mogul bears a striking similarity to one of his previous characters. Speaking with IGN Smith, who also played The Riddler in the series Gotham, agreed when co-star Youssef asked him point-blank: "Are you The Riddler of this group?" "I think there are some similarities," Smith says. "I really appreciate how insular both of those characters are. They're really sort of stranded away from people and alone and backed in a corner, and all their behavior is sort of born from that. They're incredibly narcissistic people." But that's where the similarities end. As opposed to The Riddler, Mountainhead's Venis doesn't come across as overtly malevolent. And that may be even scarier. "It's like it doesn't feel evil," Smith continues. "It just feels like a kid who's out of control." Smith's co-stars tried to bring some of that innocence to their own characters, who are hell-bent on upending the global order for the sake of their own bank accounts. "In a lot of ways it was just this 14-year-old version of me," Youssef says of his character, Jeff. "(He doesn't) know when to stop joking about something that was annoying. The whole thing kind of does feel like a bunch of high schoolers. They're still underdogs in their own mind and they never developed emotionally. They're actually incredibly adept at pushing technology, but they don't understand people." Armstrong wrote, produced, shot, and edited Mountainhead in just a few months. And that urgency feels particularly relevant in a time when AI is threatening to burrow its way into every aspect of daily life. The speed in which the movie was made proved to be beneficial to the actors on set. "Everybody felt very present the whole time," Carell says. "Excited, happy, energized, and prepared. It was like a perfect experience. I was surprised how quickly and how efficiently something can be made. Jesse Armstrong just knows what he's doing. Everybody trusted one another. And I think my biggest takeaway was sometimes it's best not to overthink or second guess." Schwartzman says shooting on location helped the cast immerse themselves completely in the story. "What Jesse did was (set up) the house like a (real) house. You could go anywhere you wanted, you could open a pantry, (and) there was food in it. Everything worked. You could (go to the bowling alley in the basement and) bowl (with) fruit. He made it available to us. It almost was not like a movie. It was like we were in this house and they were filming us." Carell, for his part, agrees. "We forgot we weren't billionaires." Mountainhead premieres May 31 at 8pm ET/PT on HBO and streaming on Max.