JESSE ARMSTRONG HADN’T planned on making another project about billionaires.
The Succession creator was taking a break after finishing HBO’s Emmy-winning series about the ludicrously wealthy siblings fighting for control over their father’s media conglomerate, which ended in May 2023. But while writing a review of journalist Michael Lewis’ book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, about crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, Armstrong got sucked into listening to podcasts featuring tech elites. It inspired him to write and direct his first feature: Mountainhead, a movie about three tech billionaires and their less rich, deeply insecure friend, all of whom have far too much power at their disposal.
“I couldn't get the … tech voice, tech man voice, a billionaire, out of my head,” Armstrong says, noting that to him, that voice embodies both “supreme confidence in their analytical abilities” and “arrogance.” Armstrong is being nice here. The word that repeatedly came to my mind while watching the foursome trade jargon, insults, and delusions of grandeur for the movie’s nearly two-hour run time was douchebag.
The film, which will start streaming on HBO May 31, stars Steve Carell as venture capitalist Randall; Jason Schwartzman as Hugo Van Yalk, whose nickname “Souper” is a reference to a soup kitchen—and his lower net worth; Cory Michael Smith as Venis, a Zuck-Elon figure unleashing hyperrealistic deepfakes on his platform Traam; and Ramy Youssef as Jeff, who plans on profiting big from releasing AI that can counter the chaos his pal Venis is wreaking on the world.
