Could Tech Billionaires Stage a Global Coup?

The tech-bro rich, they are not like you and me. They treat the world like it’s their frat house. They view atrocities not as losses of human life but as “atrocitopportunities.” They get high on the fumes of their own disruption. They buy private planes, private security armies, private compounds in the Snowy Hills of Utah, and Argentina — as in, the entire country of Argentina — on a whim. They think nothing of killing one of their own, should a formerly-down-for-anything bro not view the complete and utter breakdown of modern society as a chance to remake Earth 2.0 in their own exfoliated, highly toned image. They refuse to fiddle while Rome burns, but hey, they know a ton of venture capitalists who’d fund an app that’d allow you to soundtrack 21st century Ragnarok via the dubstep deep cuts of your choice.

Imagine a feature-length episode of Succession that treated the final season’s villain, GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson, as its main character and then multiplied him by four, and you’d have something like Mountainhead, Jesse Armstrong‘s caustic, corrosive satire of Silicon Valley mega-royalty run amuck. (It’s on Max now and premieres on HBO proper tonight.) The British showrunner of that blisteringly cynical drama spent five years and 39 episodes giving us a portrait of filthy rich people pulling strings and behaving badly. You think the elite of the elite are broken, petty, and sociopathic, the show continually and rhetorically asked. You have no idea. He now focuses all that bile and ire on the Musks, the Thiels, the Bezoses and the Zuckerbergs who feel they’re contemporary Caesars, and wonders aloud: What’s to stop them from taking everything over?

But first, there will be dick-measuring contests. Or rather, net-worth-in-billions-measuring contests, which is the One-percenter contingent’s version of slapping phalluses next to rulers on tabletops. Among the Brewsters, i.e. the quartet of CEO alphas that have gathered together for what’s supposed to be a super-chill poker weekend, the current champ would be Venis (Cory Michael Smith), whose Facebook-like platform Traam has just launched some major additions to their in-house content-creation suite. In second place is Jeff (Ramy Youssef), an AI guru getting a lot of love from the public sector about an anti-deepfake filter his company has concocted. The bronze medal goes to Randall (Steve Carell), the group’s elder statesman and self-admitted oracle of Hegelian wisdom. Rounding out the group is Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), also known as Superman. Or rather, that’s “Soup-erman,” derived from his original nickname “Soup Kitchen”; this runt of the litter still spells billionaire with a capital M.

Hugo is hosting his longtime buds at his new place outside of Park City — serious props to the production design team for making this real-life getaway somehow seem even uglier and more bunker-like — in the hopes of changing his pole position. He’s got a meditation app that will transform the mental health space, especially since that sector is blowing up due to global instability. Who better to hit up for funding then his Brewski besties?

He’s not the only one with an agenda, however. That content-creation app on Traam is stoking serious sectarian violence everywhere from Kansas to Kazakhstan, and Venis needs Jeff to sell him his AI to soothe his board. Jeff, having apparently downloaded something resembling a conscience, wants nothing to to do with his old pal’s “4Chan on fucking acid” shitshow. He’s still pissed about some podcast comments Venis made and is happy to see him twist in the wind; plus the catastrophes are doing wonders for his stock. And Randall? He’s dying of cancer, and angry that these so-called doctors he’s hired to cure him say they can’t. But if he can get Venis to fast-track his vision of downloading consciousness online, immortality is just one upgrade away.

The more these guys trash-talk each other, suck up to each other, hug it out, slug it out, undermine and over-inflate their respective achievements, the more that Mountainhead sketches a picture of these Master of the Universe in a manner that occasionally draws blood. There are enough quotable lines of dialogue in the movie’s first half to remind you why Succession was, pound for pound, one of the most profanely funny shows on TV during its run. Once the decision to attack one of their own dominates the second half, you can feel the zingers lose their sting and the story starting to sag. But as with Armstrong’s five-season History of the Decline and Fall of the Roy-man Empire, there’s a real attention paid all the way through regarding the way that the powerful speak. And more importantly, how they use language to mask, justify, salve and dismiss their self-serving rottenness. Words matter, but only when they help these men underwrite, say, releasing tools that allow for the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Or to let them sleep at night while whole populations kill each other. Or to allow them to murder someone yet retain the moral high ground, because, y’know, Nietzche.

“Do you believe in other people?” Venis asks, in a rare moment of sincerity, to Randall. “I think one has to?” his mentor replies, and given the way that Carell spins the sentence tells you how performative such notions as faith in humanity is for these guys. (All four of the stars eat heartily here, though we might give the edge to Smith, who gives Venis the same level of smarmy, superiority-complex-driven douchebaggery that he gave Chevy Chase in Saturday Night.) Which is why the band of bros’ decision that they should literally take over the world feels like a logical next step. Who or what is stop them?

No, really, we’re asking, and so is Armstrong: How could we keep these delusional ratfuckers from what they believe is their destiny of total dominion over humanity? They already control the hardware, the software, the artificial intelligence that has supplanted actual intelligence, the ability to separate fact from self-destructive LOLZ fiction. The only thing in their way is their own ADHD and dysfunctional group dynamic. Mountainhead takes its name from Hugo’s snowy retreat, which eventually doubles as a sort of Eagle’s Nest for their would-be New World Order; the moniker’s resemblance to The Fountainhead, designed by “Ayn Bland,” is duly noted. But we’d suggest an alternative title for what often feels like a documentary of our apocalypse, now: 4 Tech Bros, 1 Coup. This what happens when “move fast and break shit” becomes the ruling class’s gospel. What you end up with is a world broken faster than a speeding click.

From Rolling Stone US.