If You Didn’t Know Billionaires Are Bad, ‘Mountainhead’ Is Here to Tell You

Last week, X owner Elon Musk (net worth as of this writing: $420.6 billion) loosed his A.I. “tool” Grok on the platform, where it started promulgating false statements about “white genocide” and the Holocaust. Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg ($220.4 billion) quietly reversed itself on pledges to fund affordable housing in the Bay Area. Three months ago, Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos ($218.9 billion) drove away the Opinions Editor at the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, by ordering “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” 

I could go on, but you get the idea: When it comes to making capricious, arrogant, ill-informed decisions that are harmful to millions, the world’s three richest people never take a day off. Jesse Armstrong really didn’t need to go to the trouble of making Mountainhead to convince me billionaires are ruining our lives.

Mountainhead, which premieres on HBO and Max May 31st, is named for its location, an ostentatiously gaudy estate on a remote peak in Utah. Its owner is Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose neurosis about hosting poker night there makes more sense as we get to know his guests: Venis (Cory Michael Smith) — Ven for short — who runs a social media platform called Traam; Randall (Steve Carell), whose business has some connection to the military; and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who’s developed a filter to distinguish authentic media from that which has been generated by A.I. The group is gathering at a dangerous moment: A.I. features that were being rolled out to Traam users in limited markets have caused widespread political violence with citizens reacting to outrages that aren’t actually real. Instead of being alarmed at the part his product has played in leading to potentially millions of injuries and deaths, Ven decides to launch the product globally, spiking inflation and stoking more violence. From their perch, the billionaires (and Hugo, a lowly $521 millionaire) wonder if the unrest has given them the perfect opportunity to take over a country like Paraguay or Argentina and demonstrate how to run it properly. Could they, maybe, even “scale this up and coup out the U.S.”? 

Armstrong wrote and directed the film; it’s his first feature as a director, and his first project since HBO’s Succession made him the official dramatist of Wealth in Our Age, deeply informed by expert consultants. In the years since Succession premiered in 2018, however, we’ve all become experts in the grotesque excesses of the ultra-wealthy, so that while Mountainhead is certainly punching up, its targets still feel soft. This is true for the details that are, though well-observed, trivial: Hugo’s dorky zip vest; Ven making his underlings agree that his tweet is funny before he posts it; Randall trying to cook an egg by putting it in a dry saucepan on a stove burner. It’s also true for the story beats that are potentially apocalyptic: dismissing assassination news as “fake”; cheering on the “creative destruction” that’s devastating countries around the world; seriously pondering toppling governments so they can test their “ideas” on a captive populace. Spending the past decade or so having real billionaires boil all our brains means that nothing in Mountainhead has the power to surprise, never mind shock.

What also makes the movie hard to watch is how thoroughly despicable all the characters are. Obviously, their loathsomeness is the point; I just didn’t find it to be such a compelling or interesting point that it needed to be made and re-made for nearly two hours. Musk has been lucky that, even in projects that are officially anti-billionaire, his various fictionalized avatars — Riz Ahmed in Venom, Jon Hamm in The Morning Show, James Purefoy in Mr. Monk’s Last Case, and of course Alexander Skarsgård in Succession — have been much hotter than the real thing. Which is the hottest is, of course, a matter of taste, but Smith destroys all his predecessors in the cheekbone department. His Ven vacillates between denying that his platform is being used to foment violence and gloating about the “engagement” the content is getting. Outside of business, we see him briefly interact with a baby that appears to have some face time with Ven in the driveway: discussing pushing the baby’s naptime, Ven adds, “He can counter.” This is an infant not yet old enough to crawl, never mind speak or… negotiate. We also hear that Ven believes he “needs to jerk off every two hours,” which at least differentiates him from his most direct real-life inspiration.

Randall is introduced to the viewer as he receives a devastating health diagnosis. Rather than humanize him, this sets him up to condescend to the doctor giving him the bad news, then abandon him on the tarmac in Utah without any seeming arrangement to get home. Randall lets Ven convince him that the technology to shed his failing body to upload his consciousness to is just a few years away, Ven hyping Randall by beatboxing and “rapping,” “First brain on the grid!” “It’s nice to sing sometimes for no reason,” says Randall carefully — not quite a non sequitur on the level of “I love lamp,” but evidence that this extremely awkward man may have had some professional coaching on how to relate to other human beings.

Hugo has the lowest net worth, and the insecurity that comes with it: He can’t stop pitching everyone — including a boardroom full of Argentinian government officials hastily assembled for a video call — on the mental-health app he’s trying to scale up from its current state, earning revenue only from subscribers who’ve forgotten to cancel it. I can tell I’ve been watching too many shows about hideous rich assholes because a close-up shot of Schwartzman’s grin that revealed a small gap between two of his teeth made me think, “Maybe if he got veneers he’d be a billionaire too.” 

Other than the house staffers and assistants who, Succession-style, bustle through the edges of scenes without drawing attention to themselves, the closest thing this satire has to a norm is Jeff, the billionaire whose wealth keeps growing because, as he sarcastically puts it, “The worse the disease, the more valuable the cure!” Jeff is a pricking conscience to the other three, doing what he can to help them understand the damage Ven’s app is doing. Jeff also seems to be the only one who understands that they’re all implicated in the global devastation Traam’s A.I. tools have made possible, which is why his character’s cynical ending is the most depressingly predictable.

I have no hesitation in agreeing with Armstrong that hands like these shouldn’t be anywhere near levers of power — they shouldn’t. It’s just that it’s too real to be funny.