Michelle Goldberg, From the Creator of ‘Succession,’ a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right, NYTimes, May 26, 2026.
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. [...]
He’s succeeded. Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. [...] 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.
As the planet melts down, they start fantasizing about taking over “a couple of failing nations” and running them like start-ups.
After a bit of this and that Goldberg returns to the main line. Speaking of the mega-rich techbros:
“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.
There's more at the link.
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is a 1966 satire by Barbara Garson. It was self-published ('Grassy Knoll Press') as a pamphlet, and the full text appeared in the December 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine. It was staged in February 1967.
The play superimposes the John F. Kennedy assassination onto the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
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