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HBO’S ‘MOUNTAINHEAD,’ FROM THE CREATOR OF ‘SUCCESSION,’ A
DELICIOUS SATIRE OF THE TECH RIGHT  
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Michelle Goldberg
May 26, 2025
The New York Times
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_ Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is the way it reflects
our preposterous nightmare world. It’s not fun to live in a dawning
age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into
comedy. _

Mountainhead, Photo illustration by The New York Times; source
photograph by Macall Polay/Apple+, via HBO

 

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 premieres 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 Carell — who pontificates like the
bastard offspring of the investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

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
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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
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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.

_[MICHELLE GOLDBERG has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is
the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s
rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.]_

* mountainhead
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* technofeudalism
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* venture capital
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* Peter Thiel
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* Marc Andreessen
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* AI
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* succession
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* cryptocurrency
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* DOGE
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* Donald Trump
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