It's the End of the World (And It's Their Fault)

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2 days ago

It's late morning on a Monday in March and I am, for reasons I will explain momentarily, in a private bowling alley deep in the bowels of a $65 million mansion in Utah. Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of HBO's hit series Succession, approaches me, monitor headphones around his neck and a wide grin on his face. 'I take it you've seen the news,' he says, flashing his phone and what appears to be his X feed in my direction. Of course I had. Everyone had: An hour earlier, my boss Jeffrey Goldberg had published a story revealing that U.S. national-security leaders had accidentally added him to a Signal group chat where they discussed their plans to conduct then-upcoming military strikes in Yemen. 'Incredibly fucking depressing,' Armstrong said. 'No notes.'
The moment felt a little bit like a glitch in the simulation, though it also pinpointed exactly the kind of challenge facing Armstrong. I had traveled to Park City to meet him on the set of Mountainhead, a film he wrote and directed for HBO (and which premieres this weekend). Mountainhead is an ambitious, extremely timely project about a group of tech billionaires gathering for a snowy poker weekend just as one of them releases AI-powered tools that cause a global crisis. Signalgate was the latest, most outrageous bit of news from the Trump administration that seemed to shift the boundaries of plausibility. How can Armstrong possibly satirize an era where reality feels like it's already cribbing from his scripts?
The film was billed to me as an attempt to capture the real power and bumbling hubris of a bunch of arrogant and wealthy men (played by Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef) who try to rewire the world and find themselves in way over their heads. This was an easy premise for me to buy into, not just because of Signalgate, but also because I'd spent the better part of the winter reporting on Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government, during which time DOGE had reportedly made a 19-year-old computer programmer who goes by the online nickname 'Big Balls' a senior adviser to the State Department. In order to keep the film feeling fresh in this breakneck news cycle, Armstrong pushed to complete the project on an extraordinarily short timeline: He pitched the film in December and wrote parts of the script in the back of a car while driving around with location scouts. When we met, Youssef told me that the 'way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall.'
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By the time I met Armstrong—affable and easygoing both on and off set—he was unfazed by fact seeming stranger than his fiction. 'There's almost something reassuring about it,' he said. 'It's all moving so fast and is so hard to believe that it allows me to just focus on the story I want to tell. I'm not too worried about the news beating me to the punch.' Lots of his work, including Succession and some writing on political satires, such as Veep and The Thick of It, draw loose and sometimes close inspiration from current events. The trick, Armstrong told me, is finding a 'comfortable distance' from what's happening in reality.
The goal is to let audiences bring their context to his art but still have a good time and not feel as if they're doomscrolling. For instance, one of the main characters in Mountainhead is an erratic social-media mogul named Venis (played by Smith), who's also the richest man in the world. But the comparisons to our real tech moguls aren't one-to-one. 'I don't think you'd think he's a Musk cipher, nor is he a Zuck, but he takes something from him and probably from Sam Altman and maybe from Sam Bankman-Fried,' Armstrong said.
Mountainhead is Armstrong's first project since Succession. That show's acclaim—19 Emmy and nine Golden Globe wins—cemented Armstrong and his team of writers as the preeminent satirists of contemporary power and wealth. His decision to focus on the tech world can feel like a cultural statement of its own. Succession managed to capture the depravity, hilarity, and emptiness of modern politics, media, and moguldom existing parallel to the perpetual real-life crises of its run from 2018 to 2023. But while Mountainhead has plenty of Succession's DNA—sharing many of the same producers and writers, and some of the crew—it's much more of a targeted strike than the 39-episode HBO show. Rather than a narrative epic of unserious failsons, the film offers a relatively straightforward portrait of buffoonish elites who believe that their runaway entrepreneurial success entitles them to rule over the lower-IQ'd masses. In some ways, Mountainhead picks up where a different HBO series, Silicon Valley, left off, exploring the limits of and poking fun at the myth of tech genius, albeit with a far darker tenor.
The tech guys weren't supposed to be the next group up in the blender, Armstrong told me. He was trying to work on a different project when he became interested in the fall of Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire. Armstrong is a voracious reader and something of a media nerd—on set, he joked that he's probably accidentally paying for dozens of niche Substacks—and quickly went down the tech rabbit hole. Reading news articles turned into skimming through biographies. Eventually, he ended up on YouTube, absorbed by the marathon interviews that tech titans did with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and the gab sessions on the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks. 'In the end, I just couldn't stop thinking about these people,' he told me. 'I was just swimming in the culture and language of these people for long enough that I got a good voice in my head. I got some of the vocabulary, but also the confidence-slash-arrogance.'
As with Succession, vocabulary and tone are crucial to Mountainhead's pacing, humor, and authenticity. Armstrong and his producers have peppered the script with what he described as 'podcast earworms.' At one point, Carell's character, Randall, the elder-statesman venture capitalist, describes Youssef's character as a 'decel with crazy p(doom) and zero risk tolerance.' (Decel stands for a technological decelerationist; p(doom) is the probability of an AI apocalypse.)
'There was a lot of deciphering, a lot of looking up of phrases for all of us—taking notes and watching podcasts,' Carell told me about his rapid preparation process. When we spoke, all of the actors stressed that they didn't model their characters off individual people. But some of the portraits are nonetheless damning. Youssef's character, Jeff, the youngest billionaire of the bunch, has built a powerful AI tool capable of stemming the tide of disinformation unleashed by Venis's social network. He has misgivings about the fallout from his friend's platform, but also sees his company's stock rising because of the chaos.
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'One of the first things I said to Jesse was that I saw my younger, less emotionally developed self in the level of annoyingness, arrogance, and crudeness—mixed with a soft emotional instability—in Jeff,' Youssef told me. 'He reminded me of me in high school. I thought, These are the kind of guys who started coding in high school, and it's probably where their emotions stalled out in favor of that rampant ambition.' This halted adolescence was a running theme. On a Tuesday evening around 9 p.m., I stood on set watching five consecutive takes of a scene (that was later cut from the film) where Youssef jumps onto a chair while calling a honcho at the IMF, and starts vigorously humping Schwartzman's head. The mansion itself is like a character in the film. The production designer Stephen Carter told me it was chosen in part because 'it feels like something that was designed to impress your friends'—an ostentatious glass-and-metal structure with a private ski lift, rock wall, bowling alley, and a full-size basketball court.
Carter, who also did production design on Succession, said that it's important to Armstrong that his productions are set in environments that accurately capture and mimic the scale of wealth and power of its characters. 'Taste is fungible,' Carter told me, 'but the amount of square footage is not.' They knew they'd settled on the right property when Marcel Zyskind, the director of photography, visited. 'He almost felt physically ill when he walked into the house,' Carter said. 'Sort of like it was a violation of nature or something.' The costuming choices reflected the banality of the tech elites, with a few flourishes, like the bright Polaris snowmobile jumpsuits and long underwear worn in one early scene. 'Jesse has them casually decide the fate of the world while wearing their long johns,' the costume designer, Susan Lyall, recounted.
True sickos like myself, who've followed the source material and news reports closely, can play the parlor game of trying to decode inspirations ripped from the headlines. Carell's character has the distinct nihilistic vibes of a Peter Thiel, but also utters pseudophilosophic phrases like 'in terms of Aurelian stoicism and legal simplicity' that read like a Marc Andreessen tweetstorm of old. Schwartzman's character, Souper—the poorest of the group, whose nickname is short for soup kitchen—gives off an insecure, sycophantic vibe that reminds me of an acolyte from Musk's text messages.
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But Armstrong insists he's after something more than a roast. What made tech billionaires so appealing to him as a subject matter is their obsession with scale. To him, their extraordinary ambitions and egos, and the speed with which they move through the world, makes their potential to flame out as epic as their potential to rewire our world. And his characters, while eminently unlikable, all have flashes of tragic humanity. Venis seems unable to connect with his son; Jeff is wracked with a guilty conscience; Randall is terrified of his looming mortality; and Souper just wants to be loved. 'I think where clever and stupid meet is quite an interesting place for comedy,' Armstrong told me when I asked him about capturing the tone of the tech world. 'And I think you can hear those two things clashing quite a lot in the discussions of really smart people. You know, the first-principles thinking, which they're so keen on, is great. But once you throw away all the guardrails, you can crash, right?'
By his own admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of some of the founders he's satirizing. Perhaps because he's written from their perspective, he's empathetic enough that he sees an impulse to help buried deep among the egos and the paternalism. 'It's like how the politician always thinks they've got the answer,' he said. But he contends that Silicon Valley's scions could have more influence than those lawmakers. They can move faster than Washington's sclerotic politicians. There's less oversight too. The innovators don't ask for permission. Congress needs to pass laws; the tech overlords just need to push code to screw things up. 'In this world where unimaginable waves of money are involved, the forces that are brought to bear on someone trying to do the right thing are pretty much impossible for a human to resist,' he said. 'You'd need a sort of world-historical figure to withstand those blandishments. And I don't think the people who are at the top are world-historical figures, at least in terms of their oral capabilities.'
For Armstrong, capturing the humanity of these men paints a more unsettling portrait than pure billionaire-trolling might. For example, these men feel superhuman, but are also struggling with their own mortality and trying to build technologies that will let them live forever in the cloud. They are hyperconfident and also deeply insecure about their precise spots on the Forbes list. They spout pop philosophy but are selling nihilism. 'We're gonna show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that fucking serious,' Venis says at one point in the film. 'Nothing means anything. And everything's funny and cool.' In Mountainhead, as the global, tech-fueled chaos begins, Randall leads the billionaires in an 'intellectual salon' where the group imagine the ways they could rescue the world from the disaster they helped cause. They bandy about ideas about 'couping out' the United States or trying to go 'post-human' by ushering in artificial general intelligence. At one point, not long after standing over a literal map of the world from the board game Risk, one billionaire asks, 'Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?' Another quips: 'I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.'
The paternalistic overconfidence of Armstrong's tech bros delivers the bulk of both the dark humor and the sobering cultural relevance in Mountainhead. Armstrong doesn't hold the viewers' hand, but asks them to lean into the performance. If they do, they'll see a portrayal that might very well give necessary context to the current moment: a group of unelected, self-proclaimed kings who view the world as a thought experiment or a seven-dimensional chess match. The problem is that the rest of us are the pawns.
'The scary thing is that usually—normally—democracy provides some guardrails for who has the power,' Armstrong said near the end of our conversation. 'But things are moving too fast for that to work in this case, right?' Mountainhead will certainly scratch the itch for Succession fans. But unlike his last hit, which revolved around blundering siblings who are desperate to acquire the power that their father wields, Armstrong's latest is about people who already have power and feel ordained to wield it. It's a dark, at times absurdist, comedy—but with the context of our reality, it sometimes feels closer to documentary horror.
Article originally published at The Atlantic