Jesse Armstrong: ‘I'm Interested in the Power, Not the Money'

Bloomberg

2 days ago

In Mountainhead, the Succession creator's fictional tech titans illustrate 'what happens to people as they try to marry their egos with their moral impulses.'
What's the best TV series of the last decade?
A fair number of people would name Succession, the HBO drama that was widely seen as a take on the Murdochs and won 19 primetime Emmys over the course of its four seasons. Now creator Jesse Armstrong is back, this time directing as well as writing, and his lens is on tech-bro — rather than family — dynamics.
Mountainhead, available globally from May 31 on Max and on June 1 on Sky and Now in the UK and Ireland, follows a group of fictional but fairly recognizable tech moguls getting together for a poker weekend. The atmosphere starts off chummy (albeit in a faux, menacing way) until unforeseen circumstances make everything... rather dark. I sat down with Jesse to talk about his inspiration and his first experience directing. No spoilers, I promise.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jesse, many of us have been waiting to see what you would do after Succession. So why this particular subject, the tech titans, and why now?
I couldn't stop thinking about them after starting to read a little bit in the area. I intended to do something else, and I was trying to write a film, trying to write some prose. And after writing a book review
1 in this area, I started reading more, just as a concerned citizen. And listening to podcasts — these people are quite available.
Kudos to the literary editor who commissioned Armstrong to write this review, now that we know what it led to. The book was 2023's Going Infinite — a take on the rise and downfall of crypto-king Sam Bankman-Fried by Moneyball and Liar's Poker author Michael Lewis.
They speak to people like yourself, but they also speak to each other a lot.
2 And that tone of voice, where you can feel the assumptions pressing in or forming, their sense of the world. It feels quite unusual to get that much access to a tone of voice, the vocabulary.
Armstrong is referring to podcasts like Lex Fridman and All-In, whose hosts are tech industry insiders. These shows are big, and the conversations tend to be long, so it makes sense that they gave Armstrong a deep sense of tech executives' thought and speech.
So it started to seem like almost an unmissable opportunity to try and write something and to hit it pretty quickly because the environment moves quite fast.
Was it straight after the US election? I know you pitched this at the end of 2024, and I wondered whether you saw Elon Musk at Donald Trump's side and had a sense of this power moving way beyond tech?
No, the impulse wasn't that. When I thought of the outline of the story, it was before the election. I pitched in December and wrote in January, so it was pre-inauguration. Then there was the sight of a lot of tech people at the inauguration,
3 which was salutary. And DOGE has kind of bubbled up and almost gone away again, culturally at least, in the lifespan of the project.
It wasn't just the number of tech CEOs at Trump's inauguration, it was their placement directly behind the president. This Bloomberg story not only charts who sat where at the inauguration, but the intricacies of their relationships with the incoming administration — including newly high-profile figures such as the CEO of TikTok.
So although it feels related, I think when people see the film, it's actually about a group of people who are rather separate from government.
'I just think it's interesting what happens to people as they try to marry their egos with their moral impulses, and in this case with an unbelievably large amount of money.'
I'm interested in the idea that the vocabulary drew you in. I've had my own taste of tech titan speech recently when I interviewed Elon Musk and he called me an NPC,
4 a non-playable character.
This exchange came when I asked Elon Musk whether DOGE was still aiming to save 'at least $2 trillion' from the federal budget, as he had said last October. He told me, 'I feel you're somewhat trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist.'
Yes.
And that I was trapped in the dialogue tree of a traditional journalist.
[Jesse laughs.]
And you have brought that language into the way that your group of tech bros
5 talk to each other.
Mountainhead chronicles a poker-weekend gathering of four men who call themselves 'The Brewsters' and are both cliquey and awkward with each other. Their conversations include references to entire countries as though they were extras on a film set; people are 'fungible human assets' and 'bust a B-nut' means to invest a billion dollars (as in, 'If you bust a B-nut into this app, it will give birth to a unicorn'). There's also a hierarchy in the group: One of the four is nicknamed 'Souper,' short for 'Soup Kitchen' because he's not as rich as the others (he's worth over $500 million).
Yeah. I didn't even use NPC because it's such a direct version of the way that some of those people see the world, to think that there are non-playing characters and that you are one of them. Presumably me too. Pretty much everyone, probably. Apart from I guess Sam Altman and Donald Trump. I don't know how many people fit in the playing-character mode.
Given Elon Musk's feud with Sam Altman, he might well say even Altman's an NPC.
[Jesse laughs.] Yeah. That voice was my way in. Part of that is the terminology, part of that is the philosophical approach behind [it], and some is the characters themselves.
Let's face it, you spent a lot of time after Succession with people saying to you, 'This is clearly the Murdochs.' But this group of people: One of them is described as the richest man in the world. It looks pretty obvious that one is modeled on Elon Musk. Another is probably Sam Altman, and one is probably Peter Thiel?
6 The one they call Papa Bear.
Thiel was Facebook's first outside investor, a co-founder of Paypal, and is known for many other investments as well as for political activity. He also remains a shareholder of Palantir Technologies, whose CEO and legal counsel recently published a book that champions the idea of a state run by a master engineering class, a notion that also appears in Mountainhead.
That's Thiel?
Yes.
I mean look, one of them is the richest man in the world and Elon's the richest man in the world. Other people have felt that he was more Mark Zuckerberg. And who do you think was Sam Altman?
Jeff. Ramy Youssef's character. He's Sam Altman because he's fallen out with the richest man in the world.
7
Musk and Altman were together at the founding of OpenAI, but now lawsuits are involved. You can dig into the backstory here. When I asked Musk about Altman directly, he compared OpenAI to a conservation nonprofit that became a lumber company, and confirmed that he plans to push ahead with his lawsuit.
Well, listen, I steal from everywhere in terms of the story dynamics and although there's quite a lot of ideological similarity, there are also some very bitter personal rivalries, which is good for fiction.
They really are amalgamations of a number of different people. I have played this game with other people and I don't mind playing it, but Succession really wasn't the Murdochs. And if you thought it was, who is Jeremy Strong's character Kendall, and who is Kieran Culkin's character Roman? They didn't really map onto the kids of Rupert Murdoch directly.
Are those people the models? Yes. Is this a tech moment? Are those the leading figures? Yes. But I wouldn't have felt as free to write what I did if I felt that I was writing a version of Musk or Thiel.
You are writing about that world of the super rich again.
8
If you look at the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, you can see exactly how tech is top of the league. The six wealthiest people (all men!) made their money that way: Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
Sorry. [Laughs]
I wondered why? Is it because you have a fascination with wealth? Perhaps we're all fascinated with that world to some extent—
Yeah.
You definitely get a lot of great visuals from it, right? In Mountainhead, they are on top of a mountain in this extraordinary but horrible house full of hard surfaces.
In Mountainhead, the house in which the four Brewsters meet is named in tribute to the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead. This fits the movie's vibe, as Rand's work — featuring dogged, individualistic, egoistic characters — has become a lodestar in some business circles.
I'm willing to take a follow-up where you don't believe my initial reaction or justification, but I believe I'm doing it because I'm interested in the power, not the money. So I hope I haven't become completely seduced by hanging around in nice houses.
9
Although, as you mentioned, they're not actually particularly nice places to be. They're like fancy hotels, quite beige, quite oatmeal,
10 often quite poorly finished, thrown up and sold off often as assets.
The characters in Mountainhead, who take pride in their razor-sharp banter, have a great time mocking the mansion owned by 'Souper' (played by Jason Schwartzman). After walking into the house and finding out what it's called, Jeff (played by Ramy Youssef) asks if his interior decorator was 'Ayn Bland.'
The visuals help the drama, don't they? There they are, on top of the world. There's a Mount Olympus feeling
11 to these four men gathering. It's also a very male world, of course. They look down, physically down, on the cars waiting for them, on their staff.
The location is actually Park City, Utah, well known for its skiing and as a playground for the ultra-wealthy. It's also where the Sundance Film Festival takes place — at least until 2027 — and the city saw its resort offerings grow after nearby Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Yeah, and as a director — this is the first thing I've directed — is it nice to have Utah out of the windows? Yes. It's a considerable advantage visually, for this film takes place in constrained physical circumstances. I can't say that helicopters don't look good when you shoot them from another helicopter or a drone, I think people respond to that.
12 We did always try to remind ourselves not to be selling anyone anything.
One fascinating detail on portraying the rich came from Kieran Culkin talking to fellow actor Dan Levy about how wealth consultants helped the Succession cast. They told the actors that they were getting out of helicopters wrong. The rich don't duck down, because they know instinctively where the blades are; they've been traveling this way all their lives.
Are you in a world where you do get pitches for that, because companies want to see their products in your work?
We've resisted product placement.
Tell me about your relationship with the characters. You've spoken about your Succession characters and said that, at the moment you are writing, you have to like them to an extent, or at least suspend judgment of them.
Yeah, I think that's true. This is a slightly different tone of a piece. I'd be interested whether you agree, but I think it's more of a dark comedy than Succession was.
13
I do agree. When the action turns from verbal to more deeply threatening I was taken aback, and Armstrong plays with the shifting tone.
The way the world is, and tech's relationship to it, seems really troubling to me.
14 However, when we write the history of the world, maybe Elon Musk will have saved it, with what he has done with Tesla. Maybe Starlink is going to do extraordinary things.
Overall, Armstrong is measured when talking about Mountainhead, but Bloomberg's own review zeroed in on this angst. 'The anger that spurred Mountainhead 's creation is also its best quality,' Esther Zuckerman writes. 'Armstrong is pissed off and has decided to channel that into brutal jokes. If we can't laugh at these people, what else can we do?'
The achievements of these people are significant and real. And I'm not one of those people who thinks Musk just slaps his name on everything and takes the credit. I think he has got extraordinary talents. He seems to have taken a very dark turn in terms of his politics.
15
Musk hasn't just weighed in (verbally and financially) on US politics. He's also been supportive of Germany's far-right AfD party. 'It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,' Musk said in January, speaking during an AfD campaign event alongside the party's co-leader, Alice Weidel.
I'm worried about all the parts of tech that everyone else is, especially AI. But I wouldn't want that to diminish a sense that these people — it sounds banal, but they're very important figures and very talented figures. I just think it's interesting what happens to people as they try to marry their egos with their moral impulses, and in this case with an unbelievably large amount of money.
Tell me about the format, because I wondered about the choice to do a film versus the development that you had over successive, not only episodes, but seasons of Succession. Was it liberating to focus your energies on a single film, or did you miss the scope to develop this more?
No, I feel it is a target that I've tried to hit, and it's a one-use thing. The things that happen in the film are relatively extreme. It'd be difficult — not completely uninteresting, but difficult — to come back, quote, 'next week' from the events. The relationships are thinner, they're not family, which is great for drama. They can break apart. It was liberating, just liberating on a human level, not to have to think about running a show, which is a big endeavor.
I think the form fits the subject matter.
And directing?
And directing… Yes, I wanted to direct something. I think this was a good thing for me to direct because we wanted to make it really quickly. It's on TV six months from when it started being written and I was really keen for it to appear in the same bubble of culture or time as the audience are watching it in.
16 I like collaborating with directors, but it takes some time and it takes some adjustment to come to the same vision. And not having that I think was an advantage.
Events are indeed moving fast: Since I spoke with Jesse earlier this week, Elon Musk has announced he's leaving the Trump administration. Mountainhead does retain ambiguity on links to real-world events; Armstrong even shelved an early idea of having the tech bros watch news on ATN, Logan Roy's TV channel in Succession.
Did you think the moment might pass? Because I feel like the tech titans moment… This is our age. I think you could have taken your time with it.
Yes, I take your point, and I hope that people will be able to watch it in a few years and it'll still feel interesting. And no, they're not going away. It's just a gut feeling. It's a creative feeling. And it may have been total miasma, and it may have been also, partly, a challenge to myself. I was scared of directing. [It was] a reason to run at it rather than read everything, watch everything I could about directing.
And worry about it.
Yeah.
Did you love it, the directing? The control must be great.
[Laughs]
What you say happens. You don't give your script to someone else.
I did like it. The four leads are exceptionally talented, but also really decent and nice people, and very collaborative. So that made it a pretty easy shoot. I surrounded myself with a lot of people I'd worked with on Succession, so it was relatively comfortable.
And people like Steve Carell, on set, do they make suggestions? Do they say, 'This line doesn't really work, I'd really like to change this'?
They didn't say that particular form of criticism much. There's room to improvise, there's room for people to dodge around bits which they feel are less expressive of the characters that they've come to. I think they trusted me about the characters I've created for them.
I was scared that first morning of rehearsal, presenting myself as the director to people like Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy and Cory — who are not as storied as actors yet, but I think they will be, because they're both extraordinary.
17 So yeah, it was a moment of some anxiety: Am I really going to pretend to be the director here? But I did.
Cory Michael Smith has been a stage and screen actor and has worked several times with critically acclaimed director Todd Haynes. In Mountainhead, he plays Venis, the 'richest man in the world' character. Ramy Youssef is best known for the comedy-drama Ramy, which he co-created (and in which, fun fact, his mother is played by Hiam Abbass, who was fictional patriarch Logan Roy's long-suffering wife in Succession). Jason Schwartzman has been in a number of Wes Anderson films and played Ringo Starr in the biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And of Steve Carell's long career I will pick out just this, because it portrayed my industry: I thought his depiction of Mitch Kessler in ' The Morning Show ' was brilliant.
But your work has spoken for itself, Jesse. They're there because they've seen what you've done and they trust you. Succession must have been life-changing.
Yeah, it was. I think at least three of the actors said yes to the project before there was a script. So yeah, it has changed the sort of things I can pitch and the sort of things people are willing to do.
Is it too soon to ask what you'll do next?
It's too soon for me to answer. [Laughs]
But I'll go back to a screenplay and this fiction that I've been meddling with, and I just hope I won't get any other voices in my head.
I can't believe that the idea of a Succession Season 5 is completely out of the question. Not only because it would definitely do well, but also because of the way that you left it. That scene at the end, with Kendall looking at the water, what's he thinking? He's going to do something next, right?
I honestly don't think about those characters anymore. I think about the people a lot, and I really am very, very fond of them, but the characters to me are characters in that show. And it ended for me when it ended.
And I think maybe to support my claim that I'm really interested in the power, not the money, that show in a way was quite a lot about mortality and about an older man facing the end. And Fox is still very important to the political climate in the US, but it wanes every day and so does print journalism.
18 So the vital interest in that world for me has gone.
Ouch. While the old model of print has gone, there is a continuing market for magazines — or at least some magazines — across genres. The industry is also still ripe for fiction: Later this year, streaming service Peacock will debut a spinoff of The Office called The Paper, a mockumentary-style comedy about the staff of a declining midwestern newspaper called The Truth Teller.
When the Murdochs were fighting in Nevada and some of the stuff that came out in the papers, I did feel it would be quite easy to write another season from the material that was coming out and also seeing Shari Redstone and how she's negotiating [at] CBS and that Paramount world. There are interesting things to write about, but it just doesn't have any vitality left for me.
Personally, what did you think when you read that it was when Elisabeth Murdoch and her adviser saw the key scene — there might be people still out there who haven't seen Succession, so I'm not going to say exactly what — but the key denouement of Succession and then thought 'We better sort out our own succession.' That is life imitating art.
19
In a sweeping recounting of the Murdoch legal drama, the New York Times reported in February that Elisabeth Murdoch's representative to the family trust drafted a ' Succession memo' after seeing how poorly Logan Roy's children handled their situation. Rupert Murdoch's ultimate successor is still being decided in a Nevada court.
You never know if these stories are true, there's lots of odd briefing that goes on in a big dynastic family like that, so I never put too much credence on what people say. Honestly, I just felt humanly sad if that was the case, in that it's hard to think about your parents' death. So if that's true, I feel sad to the degree it's a human reaction, and surprised it's a corporate reaction. They really had bought [the] Murdoch myth if they hadn't realized that at some point he will pass away.
Can we talk about your observations on the changing nature of TV? Since you hit the big time in this world, quite a lot has changed for the streamers in that they're not growing as strongly as they were and YouTube is hoovering up more advertising.
20 Can you imagine making a show for YouTube?
Google's video division now accounts for more TV viewing than any other network or streaming service, and YouTube (not including its own live-TV offering that bundles traditional channels) accounted for over 12% of TV viewing in April, more than all of Walt Disney Co.'s TV networks and streaming services combined, according to Nielsen. Last year, YouTube sold almost as much advertising as Disney, Paramount, Fox and NBCUniversal combined.
Well I have a deal at HBO, so no. [Laughs]
Not right now.
Not right now. I don't know, anything's possible in the future. Personally, I grew up with the rhythm of a weekly release. I like the sense of a show growing that you get with that. I guess YouTube could do that too.
I do worry – and this might seem ironic or even disingenuous coming from someone who's done such a lot in the US recently – but I do worry about British drama and drama that's particularly about British themes. At the moment it seems like there's space for [that]. Shows like Suspect, 21 the Jeff Pope piece on Jean Charles de Menezes, which was brilliant. And Adolescence, 22 which is also brilliant. But I worry about that, and I love what the BBC does for the British broadcasting environment, and I hope it thrives.
A four-part series on Disney+, Suspect tells the story of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by police in London in 2005 after he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist.
Adolescence, which follows the aftermath of a 13-year-old being arrested for murdering a schoolmate, has been a global hit for Netflix despite its very British setting. The show explores universal themes having to do with children and social media. 'Why can't we look at phones and social media as [we do cigarettes and alcohol]? Why can't it be a public-health issue?' co-creator Jack Thorne said in an interview with Bloomberg. 'If a government takes a stand, it might have a real impact.'
It can't compete, can it, with the budget of Netflix.
Not on its own, not on the current license fee, no. 23
Armstrong is referring to the UK's system of funding television through an annual payment by households.
Can it do interesting stuff? I'm always very aware of what Armando [Iannucci] did with the small budget he was given on The Thick of It. You don't necessarily need a huge budget to do interesting work.
24
Armando Iannucci's scathing, expletive-ridden, laser-like take on British politics is cult comedy. And his distinct brand of satire has also proven popular in the US; Iannucci went on to create HBO's Veep.
The Thick of It, which you worked on. I guess that the world has really changed since then, right? The success of the streamers has inflated prices for everyone.
Well, we didn't need any helicopters in this. It was written as a sort of play. It was a pitch to HBO [that] I could do this for almost nothing, and I would, but we could do it with a bit more scope and scale if we can find an amazing place. You have to pay a crew and you have to employ people and they have to be able to live, but you can make smaller-scale pieces. And I want there to be both. I want there to be Wolf Hall and The Thick of It. I'm saying I hope that lots of money continues to go into British drama and sometimes makers might have to be inventive as well.
You're right that public service broadcasters can't afford to make tons and tons of those kinds of shows in the way that Netflix, Disney and YouTube can.
When you get used to the more comfortable budgets, it's probably very hard to imagine doing something on a shoestring. You've had the Utah mountaintop now.
I don't know. I hope I could go and make another season of Peep Show, 25 which had a perfectly decent budget, but unbelievably smaller level of magnitude. That doesn't scare me.
Armstrong co-created this British comedy series, which ran for nine seasons from 2003 and was about two young men sharing an apartment. It did indeed happen on a much smaller scale than a mountaintop — the show was filmed in just a few rooms.
As a creative person, how do you clear your head? How do you block your time out and really immerse yourself in something?
I like going to my office — it's important for me to have a regime of going there, even when I'm in a more fallow period and I might be reading more than writing. I might be staring out of the window even more than writing, but importantly not looking at my phone or the internet, because I don't take it or have it there. So from a purely creative point of view, the most important thing for me is to go out of the house without my phone and without Wi-Fi.
Leave your phone at home?
26
There was a note of horror in my voice here, but of course — unless you have the willpower to leave the phone in a drawer or avoid reaching for it — he's right. One study published in Nature in 2023 found that the mere presence of a smartphone, even if you're not interacting with it, affects attention. TLDR: When a smartphone is around, we work more slowly.
Yeah.
Wow. That's a lesson we can all take away. Do you have a notebook where you save ideas or do you not need to, because it's there in your head when you need it?
I do have a running notebook of ideas, but it's only briefly on paper and then gets transcribed digitally quite fast.
And will you be going back to one of your old — well not old, but yet unused works next?
Yes! I'm quite close to the end of the screenplay and I'm quite well into the prose I'm writing. So yeah, I hope that both of those will come to fruition.
We look forward to that. Jesse Armstrong, thank you so much.
Oh, thank you so much. It's lovely to chat.
Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend. She joined Bloomberg from the BBC, where she presented its leading news program Today on BBC Radio 4 for over a decade.
More On Bloomberg
Terms of Service Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information Trademarks Privacy Policy
Careers Made in NYC Advertise
Ad Choices
Help ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.