In November, when 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 premieres Sunday 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 the United States, 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 techno-feudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channelled into comedy.
Steve Carell plays tech titan Randy in Mountainhead.
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’ foil is Jeff, who has built an artificial intelligence 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 Carell – who pontificates like the bastard offspring of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
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As the planet melts down, they start fantasising about taking over “a couple of failing nations” and running them like startups. “We intellectually and financially back a rolling swap-out to crypto network states, populations love it, and it snowballs,” Randall says. But as the global crisis spirals and the dread spectre 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 US?”
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 cliche says, to move fast and break things. “Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?” Randall says. 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’ book about Sam Bankman-Fried 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 tech-centric 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.
