A new, standalone feature film from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, called Mountainhead, depicts four arrogant, fictional tech entrepreneurs cut from the same cloth as Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al, having a boys' weekend at a lavish mountain retreat while the world experiences a financial meltdown.
Armstrong, who after winning multiple Emmys for his writing and producing work on Succession, is making his directorial debut with Mountainhead, which premieres on HBO and HBO Max — yes, we're calling it that again! — on May 31.
After finishing the final season Succession, Armstrong tells Vulture that he went down a rabbit hole of listening to tech and venture-capital podcasts, and reading books by and about tech founders — inspired partly by Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite, about convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. He says he found that most of these (mostly) men shared "a straight-up arrogance, which is both scary and comic. You know, being unaware is a key reason why people are funny, and arrogance is a good way of being unaware. And then there’s a whole intellectual framework, which, broadly speaking, the Silicon Valley tech world brings."
Given the power being wielded these days by these American oligarchs, especially since the second election of Donald Trump, Armstrong saw the germ of timely story, which was rushed into production to make it on the air while this current chaotic period we're living in is still unfolding.
In real life, President Trump may have pulled us back from the brink of a worldwide financial crisis when he teased and then softened on some radically out-of-scale tariffs, but many are still set to take effect soon and we are hardly out of the woods.
In Mountainhead, four friends, three of whom are billionaires, watch from a luxury aerie as the world slips into a political and financial crisis — spurred in part by the release of a generative AI model by one of those in the room, Venis (pronounced like Dennis), played by Cory Michael Smith. The crisis prompts the president of the United States to seek out the help of the quartet, and they begin spitballing solutions.
"We are the smartest men in America," says Carrell's character in the trailer. "We literally have the resourcs to take over the world."
Carrell plays Randall, a venture capitalist whom Vulture says could be seen as a cross between Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffett, and who the others call "Papa Bear." Ramy Yousseff plays Jeff, whose company has created a filter to ward against hyperrealistic generative-AI images, while Smith's character is like a more nefarious Zuckerberg, who owns a major social media platform that is being overrun by AI-faked videos and images. Jason Schwarzman plays Hugo Van Yalk, the only non-billionaire, who nonetheless owns the massive house in the mountains where they are all staying.
As for the crazy speed of production — it was greenlit in December, cast and written in January and February, and shot over five weeks in March and April, with editing probably still being done — Carrell says, "It feels like he called me on a Tuesday, we shot it on a Thursday, and then it’s coming out, like, the next Friday! It’s the most compact production process I’ve ever experienced."
We'll see what our local billionaires have to tweet about it, assuming they haven't received advance copies, after it comes out.
