If you’ve ever been to a networking event in SoMa and found yourself cornered by a coder who hasn’t outgrown their Ayn Rand phase, you’ll immediately recognize the characters in HBO’s new techdoomsday satire “Mountainhead.”
In the Bay Area, a grown-up case of infectious Randianism seems to spread seasonally — and no one is too bothered. In “Mountainhead,” Jesse Armstrong, the creator of “Succession,” introduces tech avatar villains who take Randian ideas literally — and to their logical, and gruesome, extreme.
The film’s name is a nod to Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” but the plot borrows from her magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged,” in which American leaders of industry gather in a private valley and plot to take over a government they think fails to appreciate their brilliance. Rand’s capitalist titans run railroads and manufacturing empires that make real stuff, stuff so important to daily life they feel certain the country’s leaders will cave to their demands if they hold it hostage.
The capitalist titans of “Mountainhead” make AI slop and deep fakes. It’s not stuff anyone needs. Yet their innovations are thrust upon the world. The film finds four best-friend tech CEOs — they call themselves “the Brewsters” — on an annual boys trip. Unlike in “Atlas Shrugged,” where the titans remove themselves from society to plan a conspiratorial takeover, the Brewsters just happen to find themselves in a mountain mansion while their technology begins destroying the world. As they watch it happen on their phones in real time, they naturally assume they are best positioned to take over.
There’s a strict hierarchy among the Brewsters, based on wealth. The alpha alpha is Venis Parish (played by Cory Michael Smith), a blend of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who runs a Facebook-like empire that has just unleashed deep-fake video technology on the world; just below him is the Peter Thiel-esque Randall Garrett (Steve Carell), the “papa bear” of the group who owns real things like the tubes that make the internet (though he loses aura points for being sick); third is the up-and-comer Jeff Abradazi (Ramy Youssef), who owns an AI company with the power to counter Parish’s disinformation superengine; and finally, the poorest of the lot, the weekend’s host, Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), who is trying get his friends to kick in a mere billion or two for his meditation app while enduring barbs about his pitiful $500 million net worth.
Yes, these characters are as infuriating as they sound. But that’s the point. The film is positioned as a hard-hitting critique of the tech industry that Armstrong created in just over six months to resonate with the current news cycle.
So just how hard-hitting is it? These are the six criticisms that resonate most. Spoilers below, obviously.
Other people don’t exist
Tech leaders often seem out of touch with real people and, at worst, apathetic about what their technology might do. In “Mountainhead,” the characters are more than removed — they’re solipsistic.
“Do you believe in other people?” Venis asks when his company’s technology is beginning to cause a massive global meltdown. “I think one needs to,” Randall replies. “But do you? Eight billion people as real as us?” “Well, obviously not,” Randall says, as they chuckle.
Moments later, they stand atop a mountain and write their net worth on their chests, appealing to the “mountain god accelerator, legacy manifestation” to make themselves immortal, or at least richer. They may not believe in other people, but they do believe in manifesting.
Insecure men with too much power
A sticky critique of Zuckerberg over the years is that he has essentially foisted his insecurities upon the world. The film “The Social Network” cemented the idea that because he couldn’t get laid in college, he created a platform that began the process of unraveling real-life interaction.
Insecurity is a major theme in “Mountainhead,” with the possible exception of Jeff, whose confidence aligns with his higher stock price. As Venis’ deep fakes create global mayhem, companies and governments are paying top dollar to buy Jeff’s AI filter that can reveal what is real. (He remains insecure about his girlfriend, who is on her way to Mexico to attend a sex party — an extremely San Francisco thing to do.)
No one is more insecure than poor Souper, who refers to himself as “the host without the most.” The dynamic between the three billionaires and Souper evokes Silicon Valley’s popular “All-In” podcast, wherein host Jason Calacanis endures weekly ribbings about flying commercial and not being invited to the same events as his richer “besties” David Sacks, David Friedberg, and Chamath Palihapitiya.
Accelerationism at all cost
To get to the utopia that Silicon Valley imagines, you have to break some things along the way, or so the thinking goes. In “Mountainhead,” it’s not just democracy or friendship or mental health that get broken but the entire modern world order. Rather than worry, the Brewsters, as they follow along on their phones, grow increasingly excited. No one more than Randall, who calls the whole thing Hegelian.
When Venis expresses some concern over the mounting pressure to rein in his dangerous AI, Randall responds, “You’re always gonna get some people dead!” But Randall will make damn sure he isn’t one of them.
Randall is obsessed with transhumanism (the idea of merging humanity and machines) and believes that’s the new world struggling to be born amid the chaos. This is because he’s dying of cancer and refuses to admit it. Instead, he’s putting all his chips on Venis’ technology accelerating the end of the former world and ushering in an era in which Randall can live forever as bits of code in space.
“What do you think is the timeline of uploading the human consciousness?” he asks his friend, trying not to give away his desperation. Faster, says Venis, if they can get Jeff’s tech on board. “You’re first in line,” Venus assures him. “We just gotta do like a mouse, a pig, and 10 morons, and then once we’re clean, you’re going digital, Randall. First brain on the grid.”
As the film shows the world spiralling out of control, Randall does everything in his power — including cutting off electricity to Belgium and plotting to murder Jeff — to speed up the timeline for his ascendancy.
Rationalism as an immoral thought exercise
The tech industry’s fetishization of rationalism is on full display in the movie. Allegedly unemotional, the drift into deciding to kill Jeff is dotted with distorted references to Kant, along with statistics seemingly plucked from thin air but stated with extreme confidence.
One commonly used term in “Mountainhead” is thinking based on “first principles,” or breaking down complex problems into smaller fundamental truths, a favorite strategy of Musk.
The problem occurs when one of those first principles is “I am right,” and everyone who disagrees is a “decel with crazy p(doom),” or an anti-tech nihilist. Eventually, that rationalization leads the farcical effort to murder Jeff in the name of a self-serving logic.
They can’t kill their friend, but they can kill the world
The third act takes the violence and extremism from social media and into the mountain retreat, with the plot to kill Jeff because he might (gasp!) hand over his AI to the government rather than sell it to Venis.
Except the friends are too chickenshit to push him over the ledge, leaving their lackey Souper to be caught red-handed. Through whispered conversations in closets and bathrooms, they debate the best way to off Jeff. Brain? Heart? Blood? The nervous discussion contrasts with the lack of concern about the impacts of the technology they are unleashing into the world.
As Venis said after his company’s irresponsible release of generative AI tech has left governments teetering from economic instability and civil unrest: “Nothing means anything, and everything’s funny! And cool!” After all, as Jeff quips when people begin dying, “planet Earth’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
When asked about a shocking display of violence, he refuses to engage. “Heads don’t explode like that,” he replies.
Would-be kings
It’s hard to choose a more on-the-nose metaphor than four tech oligarchs discussing world domination while looking down at a massive version of the board game Risk, but 2025 is not a subtle time. From the recesses of shitposter blogs, the once-fringe philosophy of technomonarchism has crept into the mainstream, aided by the elevation of thinkers like Curtis Yarvin.
His idea — reflected in the movie — is that U.S. democracy is a failure. What the country needs is a king with absolute power, something like a CEO with super-voting shares. Though his name is not mentioned in “Mountainhead,” Yarvin’s philosophy is evident in the glib arrogance of the film’s characters that they are the chosen people, even if they can’t boil an egg.
A running gag is that they’ll let Souper rule over Argentina. At the end, it’s not clear who will be running what, but as Souper watches his friends leave Mountainhead in their black Escalades, he turns off the infinite scroll of beheadings and death and turns to his meditation app. Sigh.