Max: “Mountainhead” (2025)
Imagine Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel gathering in a $50-million-dollar ski house in Deer Valley for their annual weekend of poker. The rule: “no meals (i.e, private chef dismissed), no deals, no heels.” That goes away quickly when talk turns to ways they can enrich themselves further.
In a nutshell, that’s the idea behind “Mountainhead,” (Max), Jesse Armstrong’s mordant satire of tech bros and the power they wield in the era of AI.
Armstrong says none of these characters are intended to be replicas of the IRL tech billionaires. Sorry/not sorry, but I disagree: it’s very clear who each of them is supposed to be.
The excellent Corey Michael Smith plays Ven (aka Elon Musk), the sociopathic plutocrat who has just uploaded new AI tools to Traam, his social networking platforming, which is circulating deepfake videos. “This is so unreal, it’s real!” Ven gushes, as he scrolls through the growing global unrest and economic collapse he is causing. Like Musk, he’s obsessed with a desire to leave Planet Earth, and has a weird, remote relationship with his child (unlike Musk, he has only one, not 14.)
Steve Carrell plays Randall Garrett (aka “Papa Bear”), the elder statesman and the first investor in Traam. Like his alter ego Peter Thiel, “Rando” is interested in New Age-y treatments that prolong life—particularly his own.
Hugo von Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), the owner of the ski house, is nicknamed “Soups,” short for “soup kitchen.” That’s because with a net worth of only $550 million, he is the only non-billionaire among the four “Brewsters,” as they call themselves. Soups is the Jack Dorsey stand-in who is shopping around a Slo-zo meditation app.
Finally, Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, who has developed a rival AI platform that detects and eliminates deepfakes. Ven wants to buy Jeff’s company to fix the flaws in his own platform, but Jeff is reluctant. After all, the more desperate the world grows, the more valuable Jeff's product might become.
Jeff is an amalgam of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, Altman’s former VP of research. Amodei left to form his own company, after he became worried about OpenAI’s lack of safety measures.
The movie follows these tech bros as they hike through snowy Deer Valley in orange jumpsuits, nibble on crudités and sip champagne. But it soon becomes clear that one of the four men is not in synch with the goal of ruling the world—and not just the tech world, either.
Like all satires, the film is an exaggeration of the tech-billionaire lifestyle. But its mastery of the group’s too-cool-for-school vocabulary is spot-on. Everything is “cool,” and whatever it takes to achieve “cool” is justified. Quite simply, they believe they’re part of a special class of superhumans for whom rules do not apply and who are clueless about anyone not as wealthy or connected as they are.
“Mountainhead” (rhymes with “Fountainhead.” Get it?) may not be everyone’s cup of Tazo tea. It’s a departure from the usual “hate-the-rich” series because these creeps get even wealthier when it’s all over.
Even if you’ve only been casually following the goings-on of Big Tech, you can see after watching this show how this evil scenario could easily happen. Bravo, Jesse Armstrong who in “Succession” skewered media potentates just as brilliantly. Carry on.
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