Latest news with #Oligarchs
The Guardian
10-08-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Revealed: oligarchs spied on UK lawyers who ran Serious Fraud Office cases
Oligarchs whose business empire was under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office spied on lawyers who ran some of the UK's most sensitive criminal cases. The Guardian has obtained surveillance images of former SFO prosecutors taken by hired spies. Their goal is said to have been gathering information on the agency's activities, identifying its sources and gaining 'leverage'. Backed with billions from Vladimir Putin's regime, the oligarchs were at the time waging an aggressive counterattack against an SFO investigation into suspected corruption and fraud, a major case the agency ultimately dropped. Andy Slaughter, a Labour MP who chairs parliament's justice committee, said: 'It is deeply troubling that individuals with knowledge of serious fraud inquiries should be surveilled by the very organisations they have been investigating.' He added: 'The hunter has become the hunted.' The surveillance began in 2019. It is unclear when, or if, it finished. As the law enforcement agency that takes on the toughest white-collar crime cases against multinational corporations and billionaires, the SFO often faces fightbacks by well-funded law firms and even cyber-attacks. But this is believed to be the first time surveillance of former SFO prosecutors has been revealed. Lawyers for the oligarchs' mining company did not dispute that the surveillance took place. But they said any 'investigations' into the targets were lawful, undertaken in preparation for lawsuits it brought against the SFO. On Saturday 7 March 2020, the spies pulled up in a car outside the home of former senior SFO prosecutor Tom Martin. At 10.39am, the target emerged from his front door wearing jeans and a Wolverhampton Wanderers hoodie. It was a momentous day: Martin was taking his young son to the football for the first time. Martin had run complex, transnational bribery investigations at the SFO. Although he never worked on the oligarchs' case, he felt he would have been an attractive target for anyone seeking intelligence on the agency. Known to his colleagues as a charismatic leader, Martin had brought an employment tribunal claim over his 2018 dismissal during a power struggle with American prosecutors – a claim he would win. It was apparent from press coverage that he knew the SFO's inner workings and had fallen out badly with its management. Over years of pursuing powerful suspects, Martin had sometimes thought he was being watched. But none of his fears were confirmed. He said he was 'absolutely appalled' when the Guardian showed him surveillance images of his home taken by oligarchs' spies. 'I'm there with my lad,' he said. 'We're not fair game.' Martin said that if operatives were seeking 'kompromat', the Russian term for compromising material that can be used to apply pressure, there was nothing to find, except perhaps his passion for model trains. 'It's an attack on the rule of law,' he said. 'You're not trying to defend yourself in a court, you're trying to shift the odds in your favour.' The surveillance stretched across the country. In a rural village, the oligarchs' operatives spied on Mike Walsh, a former Metropolitan police officer. After leaving the force in the late 1990s, Walsh switched to the private intelligence industry. One client had been in a fight with the oligarchs' corporation over some African mines. In May 2019, the spies traced Walsh, who was by then retired, to his home and photographed him as he put the bins out. Other targets had held senior positions in UK law enforcement much more recently, as members of the very SFO team investigating the oligarchs' affairs. James Coussey was awarded an OBE in 2010 after decades trying to convict the perpetrators of financial crimes. Three years later, he was recruited to the SFO for one last assignment: investigating suspected fraud and bribery at a mining company that had been among the most valuable listed on the London Stock Exchange. Three oligarchs, known as the Trio, were the founders and largest shareholders of the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC). It owned mines from Kazakhstan to Congo extracting coal, chrome and cobalt. Every few days it made revenues bigger than the SFO's annual budget. The team Coussey joined followed money trails between Swiss banks, African kleptocracies, ex-Soviet dictatorships and the Mayfair property market. In 2018, after five years on the case, Coussey called an end to his career. 'I don't think he really wanted to retire,' said Martin, his SFO colleague and fellow surveillance target. 'He loved his job and he did it in a really calm and classy way.' By then, the ENRC case had become one of the highest-stakes investigations in the SFO's history. It seemed that criminal charges were close. The SFO's prosecutors had interviewed one of the oligarchs, plus the son-in-law of another. The oligarchs and their company denied wrongdoing. ENRC's lawyers were on the counterattack. As part of a high court claim against the SFO, they alleged that Coussey had negligently mishandled evidence. A judge would find no 'knowing or reckless breach of duty'. But the legal action had revealed Coussey's identity as a member of the investigation team and put him on the oligarchs' radar. In retirement, Coussey fell into ill-health. The spies' surveillance images of him are time-stamped: a Monday morning in February 2020. They show an elderly man outside his home, bald and bespectacled in a jersey and bodywarmer, pottering between the garage and a blue hatchback. Coussey has since died. Martin called him one of the prosecutors of his generation. He was 'the most upright lawyer you could ever meet', albeit with a fondness for rude jokes. 'He's given his country immense service.' Entrusted with powers to seize evidence, SFO prosecutors undergo security vetting. During his years at the agency, Martin was aware of 'near constant' cyber-attacks. So sensitive was the oligarchs' case that Coussey and the rest of the investigating team worked from a restricted area of the SFO's headquarters off Trafalgar Square. Sons of the Soviet Union's central Asian provinces, the Trio's path to riches began when two of them worked at a KGB business venture in Moscow during the fall of communism. They have used an assortment of private intelligence companies since arriving in London in the mid-2000s. There were the former agents of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence and military services who set up Black Cube and Diligence, run by alumni of MI5 and UK special forces. These operatives targeted Neil Gerrard, a former ENRC lawyer who, a judge would later find, leaked to the SFO as he milked the oligarchs for fees. Both firms say they played no part in the surveillance of former SFO prosecutors. That surveillance began in 2019, directed by Dmitry Vozianov, a Russian consultant who handles 'special situations' for oligarchs. Vozianov fends off threats to his clients' business interests, overseeing lawyers, spies and public relations experts. Faced with an SFO investigation, the Trio hired him. For this covert surveillance operation, Vozianov deployed a decorated veteran of the parachute regiment. Damian Ozenbrook served in Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and the Balkans. After leaving the military, he set up his private intelligence company , Blue Square Global. The goals of the surveillance Vozianov assigned to Ozenbrook were 'to know what was going on in the SFO', said a source with knowledge of the operation, and to find out 'what, if any, informants the SFO were using'. The source believes it was 'all about leverage'. Vozianov did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for Ozenbrook's firm did not dispute that his operatives spied on former SFO prosecutors on Vozianov's instructions – though they said there had been no surveillance of serving SFO personnel. The oligarchs' operatives also watched John Gibson, a barrister who had run the SFO's ENRC investigation for four years. Gibson left the SFO for a law firm in 2018. A letter he received two years later from ENRC's lawyers at the US firm Quinn Emanuel stated that he had been seen meeting a journalist in the National Theatre's underground car park in September 2020. An SFO spokesperson said: 'We have been aware of the risk of surveillance for many years and our first priority is always the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues. We note that this report relates to surveillance of former colleagues following their departure from the SFO.' In 2023, after a high court judge found the SFO had been wrong to accept leaked material from ENRC's lawyer at the outset of its investigation, the agency dropped the case. There was, it said, 'insufficient admissible evidence' to bring charges. Two of the oligarchs have died during the long struggle with UK law enforcement, their stakes passing to their heirs. The Russian state banks that backed them are now under sanctions. Nonetheless, their corporation is due to receive millions from the public purse as damages. While surveillance by state agencies is highly regulated – the SFO would have needed a warrant to conduct an operation like the oligarchs' – surveillance by private firms is not. Slaughter, the MP, said: 'Everything about this rings alarm bells, from the Russia links to the involvement of ex-security force operatives.' He said it raised 'wider issues for the government as to how it regulates private investigators'.
The Guardian
10-08-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Revealed: oligarchs spied on UK lawyers who ran Serious Fraud Office cases
Oligarchs whose business empire was under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office spied on lawyers who ran some of the UK's most sensitive criminal cases. The Guardian has obtained surveillance images of former SFO prosecutors taken by hired spies. Their goal is said to have been gathering information on the agency's activities, identifying its sources and gaining 'leverage'. Backed with billions from Vladimir Putin's regime, the oligarchs were at the time waging an aggressive counterattack against an SFO investigation into suspected corruption and fraud, a major case the agency ultimately dropped. Andy Slaughter, a Labour MP who chairs parliament's justice committee, said: 'It is deeply troubling that individuals with knowledge of serious fraud inquiries should be surveilled by the very organisations they have been investigating.' He added: 'The hunter has become the hunted.' The surveillance began in 2019. It is unclear when, or if, it finished. As the law enforcement agency that takes on the toughest white-collar crime cases against multinational corporations and billionaires, the SFO often faces fightbacks by well-funded law firms and even cyber-attacks. But this is believed to be the first time surveillance of former SFO prosecutors has been revealed. Lawyers for the oligarchs' mining company did not dispute that the surveillance took place. But they said any 'investigations' into the targets were lawful, undertaken in preparation for lawsuits it brought against the SFO. On Saturday 7 March 2020, the spies pulled up in a car outside the home of former senior SFO prosecutor Tom Martin. At 10.39am, the target emerged from his front door wearing jeans and a Wolverhampton Wanderers hoodie. It was a momentous day: Martin was taking his young son to the football for the first time. Martin had run complex, transnational bribery investigations at the SFO. Although he never worked on the oligarchs' case, he felt he would have been an attractive target for anyone seeking intelligence on the agency. Known to his colleagues as a charismatic leader, Martin had brought an employment tribunal claim over his 2018 dismissal during a power struggle with American prosecutors – a claim he would win. It was apparent from press coverage that he knew the SFO's inner workings and had fallen out badly with its management. Over years of pursuing powerful suspects, Martin had sometimes thought he was being watched. But none of his fears were confirmed. He said he was 'absolutely appalled' when the Guardian showed him surveillance images of his home taken by oligarchs' spies. 'I'm there with my lad,' he said. 'We're not fair game.' Martin said that if operatives were seeking 'kompromat', the Russian term for compromising material that can be used to apply pressure, there was nothing to find, except perhaps his passion for model trains. 'It's an attack on the rule of law,' he said. 'You're not trying to defend yourself in a court, you're trying to shift the odds in your favour.' The surveillance stretched across the country. In a rural village, the oligarchs' operatives spied on Mike Walsh, a former Metropolitan police officer. After leaving the force in the late 1990s, Walsh switched to the private intelligence industry. One client had been in a fight with the oligarchs' corporation over some African mines. In May 2019, the spies traced Walsh, who was by then retired, to his home and photographed him as he put the bins out. Other targets had held senior positions in UK law enforcement much more recently, as members of the very SFO team investigating the oligarchs' affairs. James Coussey was awarded an OBE in 2010 after decades trying to convict the perpetrators of financial crimes. Three years later, he was recruited to the SFO for one last assignment: investigating suspected fraud and bribery at a mining company that had been among the most valuable listed on the London Stock Exchange. Three oligarchs, known as the Trio, were the founders and largest shareholders of the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC). It owned mines from Kazakhstan to Congo extracting coal, chrome and cobalt. Every few days it made revenues bigger than the SFO's annual budget. The team Coussey joined followed money trails between Swiss banks, African kleptocracies, ex-Soviet dictatorships and the Mayfair property market. In 2018, after five years on the case, Coussey called an end to his career. 'I don't think he really wanted to retire,' said Martin, his SFO colleague and fellow surveillance target. 'He loved his job and he did it in a really calm and classy way.' By then, the ENRC case had become one of the highest-stakes investigations in the SFO's history. It seemed that criminal charges were close. The SFO's prosecutors had interviewed one of the oligarchs, plus the son-in-law of another. The oligarchs and their company denied wrongdoing. ENRC's lawyers were on the counterattack. As part of a high court claim against the SFO, they alleged that Coussey had negligently mishandled evidence. A judge would find no 'knowing or reckless breach of duty'. But the legal action had revealed Coussey's identity as a member of the investigation team and put him on the oligarchs' radar. In retirement, Coussey fell into ill-health. The spies' surveillance images of him are time-stamped: a Monday morning in February 2020. They show an elderly man outside his home, bald and bespectacled in a jersey and bodywarmer, pottering between the garage and a blue hatchback. Coussey has since died. Martin called him one of the prosecutors of his generation. He was 'the most upright lawyer you could ever meet', albeit with a fondness for rude jokes. 'He's given his country immense service.' Entrusted with powers to seize evidence, SFO prosecutors undergo security vetting. During his years at the agency, Martin was aware of 'near constant' cyber-attacks. So sensitive was the oligarchs' case that Coussey and the rest of the investigating team worked from a restricted area of the SFO's headquarters off Trafalgar Square. Sons of the Soviet Union's central Asian provinces, the Trio's path to riches began when two of them worked at a KGB business venture in Moscow during the fall of communism. They have used an assortment of private intelligence companies since arriving in London in the mid-2000s. There were the former agents of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence and military services who set up Black Cube and Diligence, run by alumni of MI5 and UK special forces. These operatives targeted Neil Gerrard, a former ENRC lawyer who, a judge would later find, leaked to the SFO as he milked the oligarchs for fees. Both firms say they played no part in the surveillance of former SFO prosecutors. That surveillance began in 2019, directed by Dmitry Vozianov, a Russian consultant who handles 'special situations' for oligarchs. Vozianov fends off threats to his clients' business interests, overseeing lawyers, spies and public relations experts. Faced with an SFO investigation, the Trio hired him. For this covert surveillance operation, Vozianov deployed a decorated veteran of the parachute regiment. Damian Ozenbrook served in Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and the Balkans. After leaving the military, he set up his private intelligence company , Blue Square Global. The goals of the surveillance Vozianov assigned to Ozenbrook were 'to know what was going on in the SFO', said a source with knowledge of the operation, and to find out 'what, if any, informants the SFO were using'. The source believes it was 'all about leverage'. Vozianov did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for Ozenbrook's firm did not dispute that his operatives spied on former SFO prosecutors on Vozianov's instructions – though they said there had been no surveillance of serving SFO personnel. The oligarchs' operatives also watched John Gibson, a barrister who had run the SFO's ENRC investigation for four years. Gibson left the SFO for a law firm in 2018. A letter he received two years later from ENRC's lawyers at the US firm Quinn Emanuel stated that he had been seen meeting a journalist in the National Theatre's underground car park in September 2020. An SFO spokesperson said: 'We have been aware of the risk of surveillance for many years and our first priority is always the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues. We note that this report relates to surveillance of former colleagues following their departure from the SFO.' In 2023, after a high court judge found the SFO had been wrong to accept leaked material from ENRC's lawyer at the outset of its investigation, the agency dropped the case. There was, it said, 'insufficient admissible evidence' to bring charges. Two of the oligarchs have died during the long struggle with UK law enforcement, their stakes passing to their heirs. The Russian state banks that backed them are now under sanctions. Nonetheless, their corporation is due to receive millions from the public purse as damages. While surveillance by state agencies is highly regulated – the SFO would have needed a warrant to conduct an operation like the oligarchs' – surveillance by private firms is not. Slaughter, the MP, said: 'Everything about this rings alarm bells, from the Russia links to the involvement of ex-security force operatives.' He said it raised 'wider issues for the government as to how it regulates private investigators'.
Fox News
08-06-2025
- Business
- Fox News
Bernie Sanders urges Democrats not to work with ‘right-wing extremist' Musk after Trump fallout
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., ruled out the idea that Democrats should work with Elon Musk after his explosive falling out with President Donald Trump, labeling the Tesla CEO a "right-wing extremist." Musk said that he "strongly supported Obama" but felt that the modern Democratic Party had been "hijacked by extremists" in an April 2022 post on X. "Musk has evolved over the years. My understanding is he actually voted for Obama in 2008. But over the years, he has developed into a right-wing extremist," Sanders told CNN "State of the Union" host Dana Bash after she asked if Democrats should work with the tech billionaire after his "breakup" with Trump. Sanders dismissed the idea out of hand and said Trump and Musk's drama was further proof that the United States was devolving into an oligarchic society. The self-proclaimed democratic socialist dismissed the episode as a fight among oligarchs, and slammed it as an "embarrassment" to people who believe in democracy and the rule of law. "Musk said to Trump, 'hey listen, I spent $270 million to get you elected. I bought you the presidency because we have a corrupt campaign finance system and billionaires can do that.' And Trump said, 'well, I gave you the right to run the government for three or four months, but I don't like the guy you want to run NASA, and we're going to get rid of him' and Musk got upset," Sanders said. Musk endorsed Trump after he survived his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and subsequently served as one of his top surrogates and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Trump selected Musk to serve as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and tasked him with cutting waste, fraud and abuse from the federal bureaucracy. Musk's tenure at DOGE was tumultuous. Although he found billions of dollars in spending cuts, his reductions in federal outlays fell far short of the trillion dollars he promised. Backlash to Musk's work within the administration caused his businesses to suffer. Trump and Musk's relationship took a turn for the worse after the president withdrew Musk-ally Jared Isaacman's nomination to lead NASA. Musk proceeded to trash the "big beautiful bill" Trump is trying to get through Congress, claiming Trump only won because he donated $270 million to aid his campaign and alleging, without proof, that the president is featured in the so-called Epstein files in an X post he subsequently deleted. Trump warned that Musk will have to face "very serious consequences" if he funds Democratic candidates as a result of their rupture. When asked by Bash if he feels that Musk is correct in claiming that Trump only won because of Musk's money, Sanders responded affirmatively.
Al Arabiya
03-06-2025
- Business
- Al Arabiya
UK threatens to sue Russian businessman Abramovich over use of money from Chelsea sale
Britain has threatened to take Russian businessman Roman Abramovich to court over the frozen 2.5 billion pounds ($3.4 billion) in proceeds from his sale of Chelsea soccer club that he wanted to go to victims of Russia's war in Ukraine. Britain sanctioned Abramovich in a crackdown on Russian oligarchs after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, triggering a rushed sale of the Premier League club and freezing of the proceeds. Britain wants the funds spent only in Ukraine in line with a wider European push for Moscow to foot the bill for the deaths and destruction triggered by its invasion. Abramovich is seeking more flexibility and wants the money to go to all victims. In a rare joint statement, British finance minister Rachel Reeves and foreign minister David Lammy said on Tuesday the government was ready to step up efforts to secure the money. 'The government is determined to see the proceeds from the sale of Chelsea Football Club reach humanitarian causes in Ukraine, following Russia's illegal full-scale invasion. We are deeply frustrated that it has not been possible to reach agreement on this with Mr Abramovich so far,' they said. They said the door for negotiations would remain open but that they were 'fully prepared to pursue this through the courts if required.' A lawyer for Abramovich in Britain did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters reported in March that Britain was considering legal action over the issue. Under Abramovich, Chelsea enjoyed the most successful run in its history before the club was sold to a consortium led by US investor Todd Boehly and private equity firm Clearlake Capital in May 2022. Proceeds from the sale are frozen in a British bank account. They cannot be moved or used without a license from the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, the agency in the finance ministry that enforces sanctions.
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tech-bro satire Mountainhead is an insufferable disappointment
Picture this: a group of very rich people gather at an ostentatiously large, secluded retreat. The SUVs are black, tinted, sleek. The jets are private. The egos are large, the staff sprawling and mostly unseen, the decor both sterile and unimaginably expensive. This is the distinctive milieu of Succession, the HBO juggernaut which turned the pitiful exploits of a bunch of media mogul failsons into Shakespearean drama for four critically acclaimed seasons. It is also the now familiar aesthetic of a range of eat-the-rich satires plumbing our oligarchic times for heady ridicule, if increasingly futile insight – The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out: Glass Onion, Parasite, The White Lotus and the recent A24 disappointment Death of a Unicorn to name a few. (That's not to mention countless mediocre shows on the foibles of the wealthy, such as this month's The Better Sister and Sirens.) So suffice to say, I approached Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong's first post-series project about four tech billionaire friends gathering for poker as one's AI innovation wreaks havoc on the globe, with a sense of pre-existing fatigue. The market of ultra-rich satire is, to use the logic of Armstrong's characters, saturated. (Or, to use their language: 'I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.') There's more than a whiff of Argestes, the second-season Succession episode at a billionaire mountain retreat, to these shots of private cars pulling up to a huge chalet hugged by snowcapped peaks. And though Armstrong, who solely wrote and directed the film, continues his avoidance of easy one-to-ones, there's more than a whiff of Elon Musk to Venis (Cory Michael Smith), an AI company CEO and the richest person in the world with a tenuous grasp on reality, a stupendous sense of nihilism and unrepentant need to assert his own virility (the landscape, he notes, is 'so beautiful you can fuck it'). In some ways, it's a relief to see tech bros, especially AI entrepreneurs, reach full, unambiguous movie-villain status. Already, there is a competently made movie for the Doge era, and Armstrong, as ever, can nail hairpin turns of phrase on the sentence level. But as much as I hate to contribute to the 'anti anti-rich content' discourse, on which much ink has already been spilled, I can't say Mountainhead refuted any expectations of reality fatigue; watching Venis, host Soup (Jason Schwartzman, playing the least rich of the group, and thus nicknamed after a soup kitchen), Marc Andreessen-esque venture capitalist Randall (a miscast Steve Carell), and fellow AI wunderkind Jeff (Ramy Youssef) brainstorm plans for the post-human future as more of a slog than if I were high-altitude hiking with them. To be honest, I'm not sure any classic satire – as in, using irony or exaggeration to highlight hypocrisies, vices and stupidity – could work for the second Trump administration, at once dumber and more destructive than the first, nor the release of generative AI on the public. Both require a level of hypernormalization and devaluing of reality that make the idea of enlightening ridiculousness feel, well, ridiculous. Even the most inventive writers and performers will struggle to craft humor out of beyond farcical political figures and norms degraded beyond recognition (see: Mark Ruffalo's effete and grating parody of Trump in Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17). Succession, which ran from 2018 to 2023, soared on its 'ludicrosity', to borrow a made-up term from its billionaire patriarch Logan Roy, with a precise critical distance from reality. The deeply cynical, psychically fragile, acid-tongued media conglomerate family loosely based on the Murdochs were just far enough removed from the real Fox News timeline. Its inverted morals, barren decadence and high irony the right angle of fun-house mirror to become, in my view, the defining show of the Trump era, without ever mentioning his name. But we are in a different era now, and the same tools feel too blunt to meet it. Mountainhead shares much of the same DNA as Succession, from Armstrong to producers to crew, to trademark euphemisms (why say 'murdered' when you can say 'placeholdered'?) It was completed on an extraordinarily fast timeline – pitched in December 2024, written (partly in the back of cars while scouting locations) this winter, filmed in Park City in March and released by end of May – giving it the feel of a streaming experiment for the second, more transparently oligarchic Trump term. How fast can you make an HBO movie? How can you satirize current events moving at a speed too fast for any ordinary citizen to keep up, let alone be reasonably informed? 'The way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall,' Youssef told the Atlantic, and it shows. Mountainhead plays out less like a drama between four tenuously connected, very rich friends, and more like a random word generator of tech and finance bro jargon – decel (deceleration, as in AI), p(doom) (the probability of an AI apocalypse), first principles. (Armstrong, by his own admission, binged episodes of the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Trump's AI/crypto czar David Sacks.) The backgroup of this billionaire conclave are series of escalating crises from Venis's guardrail-less AI that feel themselves AI generated – women and children burned alive in a mosque, a deluge of deepfakes that imperils governments in Armenia, Uzbekistan, Japan, Ohio. Italy defaults on its debt. Should they take over Argentina? Buy Haiti? 'Are we the bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?' The deluge of contextless, characterless chaos – Succession's Kendall would call this dialogue 'complicated airflow' – succeeds in highlighting the depersonalizing effect of Silicon Valley's many innovations. None of this feels real, because none of this is real to these characters. Millions of No Real Persons Involved. But that is undercut by a pervasive sense of self-importance. Like the irksome climate-change satire Don't Look Up, directed by Succession executive producer Adam McKay, the exaggerated hijinks of Mountainhead reveal a deep self-assurance of its politics that border on smug. It's not that it doesn't, like Succession, attempt to humanize these figures – each billionaire has an Achilles heel of morality or mortality, though by now the fallibility of Musk-like figures is far from a revelation. It's that the drama between these billionaires felt frictionless – mostly unchallenged by secondary figures and impervious to other perspectives, at once predictable and insufferable to watch. Every human has their unique foibles and contradictions, but Mountainhead found itself too enthralled by figures who are no longer interesting, if they ever were. I found myself longing for more than two minutes with the girlfriend, the ex-wife, the assistant, the board member, let alone one of the many staff at the house – anyone to de-center a perspective that has already claimed far too much oxygen in the public sphere. For a Real Person to get involved. But that may be beyond this flavor of satire, now in an era of diminishing returns.
