Latest news with #techbillionaires
The Verge
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Mountainhead succeeds at showing you how truly deranged the billionaire mindset can be
The degree to which Mountainhead, HBO's new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you laugh depends almost entirely on how much news you consume about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by fate to shape the arc of history. The more time you've spent listening to Silicon Valley types wax poetic about reality being a simulation, ' universal basic compute,' and how humanity is a 'biological bootloader' for artificial intelligence, the less Mountainhead 's CEO characters come across as being amusing caricatures. But if you're part of the lucky bunch that has never bothered listening to billionaires insist that they're going to achieve immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead might strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class. Especially in this moment where we've all been able to watch some of the world's richest tech overlords prostrate themselves before Donald Trump in hopes of amassing even more power, the movie's depiction of tech bros flirting with the idea of taking over the world seems so plausible that it almost doesn't work as satire. But each of Mountainhead 's lead performances is infused with a manic, desperate energy that makes the film feel like an articulation of the idea that, when you strip all the self-aggrandizing mythos away, billionaire founders are just people with enough money to make their anxieties and insecurities everyone else's problem. Though it's narrative territory we've seen Armstrong explore before, Mountainhead is no Succession. Compared to Armstrong's more expansive episodic work, there's a breathless urgency to his first feature that reflects the speed with which he wrote and shot it. But the film does make you appreciate how dangerous and divorced from reality today's titans of industry tend to be when left to their own devices. Set almost entirely in a palatial lodge nestled high up in the Utah mountains, Mountainhead revolves around a quartet of absurdly wealthy frenemies who come together for a weekend of rest, relaxation, and metaphorical dick measuring while the rest of the world hurtles toward a doomsday scenario. On some level, social media tycoon Venis (Cory Michael Smith) knows that the new generative AI tools rolling out on his Twitter-like platform, Traam, have the potential to incite chaos by feeding people deepfaked footage designed to keep them angry and endlessly scrolling. Venis has seen the news reports about multiple outbreaks of violence targeted at immigrants and ethnic minorities. He's also heard commentators linking his creation to a widespread erosion of trust on a societal level. But with his net worth at an all-time high, it's easy for the twitchy CEO to ignore all that bad press and dismiss the disturbing imagery flooding Traam. Similar to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Mountainhead frames AI's ability to obfuscate the truth and manipulate people's perceptions of reality as the kind of threat that should give everyone pause. But rather than telling a story about humans racing to stop a tech-driven apocalypse, Armstrong is much more interested in exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence's potential for harm is directly connected to the worldviews of those who create it. Venis isn't the only tech mogul ready to roll his eyes as Traam's AI continues to stoke unrest and violence around the globe. Almost all of his closest friends — a small group of men who call themselves the Brewsters — feel exactly the same way. James (Steve Carell), a steely Steve Jobs type who refuses to accept the reality of his terminal cancer diagnosis, sees Traam's popularity as a sign that Venis is on the right path and setting himself up to corner the market on digitizing human consciousness within a decade. Even though Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the creator of a rival AI toolset that can reliably identify deepfakes, has gone on the podcast circuit understandably trash-talking Venis, he can't deny that Traam's dangerous slop has led to an exponential growth of his own valuation. And as the 'poorest' member of the Brewsters, multimillionaire health nut Hugo / 'Soup Kitchen' (Jason Schwartzman), is more than willing to cosign basically anything his friends do. Some of it boils down to Soup's need for an influx of cash for his next business venture — an ill-conceived wellness and meditation app. But the deeper truth that Armstrong repeatedly highlights is that groups like the Brewsters always need someone around who's willing to play a game of boar on the floor or eat a soggy biscuit to make themselves feel like they're all having a good time. The desire to have a good time is ostensibly why Soup invites the other Brewsters to come spend the weekend at Mountainhead, his drearily chic vacation home that reeks of new money and a juvenile obsession with Ayn Rand. But once the group has gotten together and sent their assistants — most of the movie's sparingly few women characters — away, it isn't long before the boys' deep-seated resentments of one another start bubbling to the surface. And when the unnamed president of the United States calls up Venis and Jeff to discuss how the Traam deepfake situation is getting worse by the minute, the group takes it as a sign that they might be looking at an opportunity to play and win a game of real IRL Risk. Given how relatively few places it physically takes its characters, Mountainhead does a solid job of not feeling like a claustrophobic play about delusional billionaires beefing on top of a mountain. Few of the Brewsters' digs at each other are truly laugh-out-loud funny, but what's impressive is how each of the characters feels like a distinct embodiment of the culture that gave birth to the modern celebrity tech founder archetype. Armstrong wants us to see these people as ghouls who are beyond high on their own supplies, but also as profoundly broken men whose fixations on biometrics and being seen as sigma men speak to a deeper sense of inescapable inadequacy. Things like James' tense relationship with his personal doctor and the odd, vaguely homoerotic game of wits Venis and Jeff start to play in Mountainhead 's third act are intriguing. But they're also part of what makes the film feel like it might have been more compelling as a miniseries with enough time and space to show us more of how the Brewsters move through the world and what besides their money would make these four men want to spend time with one another. Just when Mountainhead starts to get juicy and unhinged, it rushes to a dramatic climax that feels right-minded, but premature. It's almost as if Armstrong means to leave you unsatisfied as a way of emphasizing how people like the Brewsters seldom get what they really deserve. As a piece of eat (and ogle) the rich social commentary, Mountainhead works fine if you're craving a cheeky, surface-level indictment of tech barons who fancy themselves as gods. But if you're looking for something more dramatic and substantive, you might be better off just reading the news.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Salutes, Maga hats and mass layoffs: Elon Musk at Doge
In his 130 days as a special government employee, the world's richest man slashed his way through federal agencies, laying off government employees and gaining access to data that will underpin a dismantling of the federal government. Elon Musk's role in the Trump administration is without modern precedent. Here's a look at some key moments in the brief tenure Musk had as a federal employee. Musk is at Trump's side, as are a host of other tech billionaires, as he is inaugurated. He also issues an apparent fascist-style salute on stage at an inauguration celebration, twice. The president issues an executive order that creates Musk's 'department of government efficiency' by renaming the United States Digital Service agency, which previously handled governmental tech issues. Trump's order includes only a vague mandate to modernize government technology and increase efficiency, but within days it becomes clear Musk and his team have far more expansive aims. Musk and Doge pop up at the offices of numerous government agencies, starting with the General Services Administration, to question federal employees and start gathering data and access to government systems. Doge's early days make headlines for targeting masses of government workers with layoffs and pushing others to resign, with more than 2 million employees receiving an email titled 'Fork in the road' that encourages staffers to take a buyout. The emails, which ask, 'What did you accomplish this week?' become a signature of Musk and his new bureau, sent again and again whenever staff began to prey on a new herd of government employees. As Doge staffers storm into the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in early February, they find themselves in a heated standoff with security officials who try to bar them from accessing a secure room which holds sensitive and confidential data. The confrontation ends with USAID's top security official being put on administrative leave, while Doge gains access to its systems. With no one to stop them, Doge staffers begin the process of hollowing out the agency that had once been the world's largest single supplier of humanitarian aid. More than 5,600 USAID workers around the world are fired in the ensuing weeks. 'We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,' Musk boasts days later on X, his social media platform. Musk tells a rightwing influencer on X that the GSA's 18F office, which helped build software projects such as the IRS's free tax filing service, was 'deleted' in response to an inaccurate post accusing the group of being radical leftists. 'We do need to delete entire agencies,' Musk tells attenders at a World Governments Summit in Dubai. 'If we don't remove the roots of the weed, then it's easy for the weed to grow back.' The Trump administration orders agencies to fire thousands of probationary workers – a designation that applies to employees who have been at their jobs for less than a year, including those who may have been recently promoted. Other workers soon receive an email from Doge that demand they list five things they did last week or face termination, a chaotic request that also turns out to be an empty threat. Cabinet officials privately deem it nonsensical. A 'Tesla takedown' protest movement and boycott starts taking off, targeting Musk's car company with protests at dealerships. A protest on this date in New York City at a showroom has a solid turnout. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Musk stands on stage in a black Maga hat, sunglasses and gold chain, gleefully wielding a chainsaw that was gifted to him by Javier Milei, the rightwing Argentinian president. 'This chainsaw is for bureaucracy!' he says. 'I am become meme.' In the middle of the night, workers at 18F are notified that they will be laid off en masse. Court cases filed earlier in Trump's term begin producing rulings that curtail Doge's layoffs and temporarily block its access to data. Judges rule that the Trump administration needs to reinstate probationary workers they fired, limit some Doge access to databases at agencies such as the Social Security Administration, and order Musk's team to turn over internal records it had been seeking to keep private. The Department of Health and Human Services announces it is cutting 10,000 jobs to align with Trump's executive order on Doge. In a display of the chaos that Doge had inspired, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, weeks later admits about 2,000 of those workers were fired in error and would need to be reinstated. The Tesla protests are working – stocks are falling. In response, Trump appears on the White House driveway in front of several parked Teslas, telling reporters he is going to buy one of them and praising Musk as a 'patriot'. Others in Trump's orbit, including the Fox News host Sean Hannity, also post sales pitches for the automaker. Musk's reaction to court rulings against Trump is a constant stream of attacks against the judicial system on X, which include demands that lawmakers 'impeach the judges' and claims there is a 'judicial coup' under way against Trump. Musk repeatedly amplifies far-right influencers saying the US should emulate El Salvador's strongman president, Nayib Bukele, whose party ousted supreme court judges in 2021 in a slide toward authoritarianism. A fully fledged international protest movement against Tesla and Musk is building. Thousands of people gather at showrooms from Sydney to San Francisco in a day of action, with organizers stating that 'hurting Tesla is stopping Musk'. Vandalism against Tesla dealerships, charging stations and cars also intensifies around the world, including multiple molotov cocktail attacks and incidents of arson. Trump and Musk call the attacks domestic terrorism, while Pam Bondi, the attorney general, vows to crack down on anyone targeting Tesla. Musk poured money into a Wisconsin supreme court race that would have tilted the swing state's high court toward conservatives. He and his groups spent more than $20m on this race, including a giveaway of $1m checks on stage. Susan Crawford, the Democrat, wins the race handily, showing Musk's money couldn't buy everything. A first-quarter earnings call reveals Tesla's performance was even worse than expectations, with a 71% drop in profits and 9% drop in revenue year over year. Musk announces he will spend significantly less time working on Doge starting some time in May. In a cabinet meeting, Musk puts on two literal hats – a 'dark Maga' hat covered by a 'Gulf of America' hat. After Trump compliments the double-caps, Musk jokes: 'They say I wear a lot of hats'. This is potentially Musk's final cabinet meeting. May finds a less vocal Musk than the aggressive tone he took the rest of the year, providing fuel for protests and lost revenue for Tesla. As Congress debates Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' that would slash government services, Musk says he's 'disappointed' by the bill because it doesn't cut enough on domestic policy. 'I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it can be both,' he tells CBS. Musk's time as a special government employee comes to an end, capping off the 130 days he is allowed to serve in this role.
BBC News
2 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
Jesse Armstrong: Why I'm writing about rich people again
Jesse Armstrong, one of the UK's most successful screenwriters, is not one to rest on his off the back of his hit show Succession, which followed the twists and turns in the lives of media mogul Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and his four children, Armstrong is back with his first feature-length film, a satire film about a group of four tech billionaire friends who go away to a mountain resort for the weekend but find themselves and their social media companies under scrutiny as social unrest spreads across the at the Hay Festival, Armstrong says: "People start by saying, 'Why are you doing these rich people again? And it's a fair question. They're tech billionaires. Succession was about a big media family. And I think it's because I'm interested in power, I don't think it's about just wealth."Succession was very clearly about why is the world like it is, who has power?"HBO's Mountainhead, starring Steve Carrell and Ramy Youssef, was made very quickly."We did it at great speed. I pitched it in December and wrote it in January... carried on re-writing it through pre-production and then shot it in 22 days, then edited it."We only finished (editing) about a week ago and it's on TV this weekend!"Armstrong, 54, wanted to do a quick turnaround on the film to try to capture the feeling and pace of technological developments and society's fear about keeping up. "The anxieties that we have about technology, especially AI, feel very present and move quite fast. And I wanted to try and write it in the same mood as you might be when you're watching it, so I was keen to do it quickly," he says."Another attraction for me was that I've never directed anything before and it made me feel less anxious to run at it and do it really, really quickly." Armstrong, who cut his teeth in children's TV before writing for shows such as The Thick of It and going on to co-create series like Peep Show and Fresh Meat, said the inspiration for Mountainhead came from listening to podcasts."I wrote a book review about Sam-Bankman-Fried, the crypto fraudster, and then I read more and more about tech, and I started listening to podcasts of senior tech figures, from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, but also the mid-level people and even lower level - it's an ecosphere."I couldn't stop thinking about the voice of these people. I do love getting the vocabulary right. For me, that opens the door, once I can hear them talking. And since it seems like the AI companies are scraping so much of our hard work to train their models, I thought I would scrape them back [using their podcasts]!"Armstrong told the Hay audience that while he knew his job was to engage viewers, writing the film "was a way of expressing a load of feelings about that world and about those men - they're almost all men in that world - and it's cathartic". His shows are known for their dark humour and Armstrong says if he had to write his job description in his passport application, he would put down "comedy writer", adding that he doesn't think of himself as a storyteller."I'm trying to make a story engaging that will probably involve people laughing. And the bit that I find most challenging is finding a story because people remember jokes, but you just won't make it through that half hour or hour unless that story is is compelling enough to make an audience follow along." 'More fearful' Many writers and showrunners end up directing episodes of the series that they have created but Armstrong says he couldn't do that on Succession, which won multiple awards including 14 primetime Emmys."I always felt like the people who did it were so good at it that it was rather rude of me to suggest I could just come in and do it just as well."Armstrong doesn't appear to be your stereotypical confident showrunner, coming across as quite shy and humble, despite his success."Sometimes very creative people have a real 'screw you' attitude to authority, and I don't have that. Maybe I'm a bit more fearful, a bit more amenable. I like everyone to be happy. I want to to give people what they want in quite a decent and humane way. "I don't have a confrontational attitude to people I work with, unless someone's a jerk - I hope I can stand up for myself and the work."Mountainhead is released on HBO and Max on 31 May
Associated Press
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Movie Review: A tech bro-pocalypse in Jesse Armstrong's 'Mountainhead'
'Succession' fans rejoice. Jesse Armstrong has again gathered together a conclave of uber-wealthy megalomaniacs in a delicious satire. 'Mountainhead,' which the 'Succession' creator wrote and directed, is a new made-for-HBO movie that leaves behind the backstabbing machinations of media moguls for the not-any-better power plays of tech billionaires. Or, at least, three billionaires. Their host for a poker weekend in the mountains at a sprawling estate named after Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead' is Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), the solo member of the group not to reach, as they say, 'B-nut' status. His net worth is a paltry $521 million. The others are three of the wealthiest men in the world. Randall (Steve Carell) is their senior, a kind of Steve Jobs-like mentor they all call 'Papa Bear.' Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who runs the world's leading AI company, calls Randall the 'Dark Money Gandalf.' Lastly, but maybe most notably, is Venis (Cory Michael Smith), whose social media platform boasts 4 billion users globally. But the latest update to Venis' platform, named Traam, is causing havoc. As the four gather at Hugo's isolated perch in the Utah mountains, news reports describe violence sweeping across Asia due to an outbreak of deepfakes on Traam that have wrecked any sense of reality. Yet what's real for this quartet of digital oligarchs — none of whom has a seemingly direct real-life corollary, all of whom are immediately recognizable — is more to the point of 'Mountainhead,' a frightfully credible comedy about the delusions of tech utopianism. Each of the four, with the exception of some hesitancy on the part of Jeff, are zealous futurists. On the way to Mountainhead, a doctor gives Randall a fatal diagnosis that he outright refuses. 'All the things we can do and we can't fix one tiny little piece of gristle in me?' But together, in Armstrong's dense, highly quotable dialogue, their arrogance reaches hysterical proportions. While the cast is altogether excellent, this is most true with Smith's Venis, a tech bro to end all tech bros. As the news around the world gets worse and worse, his certainty doesn't waver. Earth, itself, no longer hold much interest for him. 'I just want to get us transhuman!' he shouts. Progress (along with net worth) is their cause, and much of the farce of 'Mountainhead' derives from just how much any semblance of compassion for humanity has left the building. It's in the way Venis blanches at the mention of his baby son. It's in the way, as death counts escalate in the news on their phones, they toy with world politics like kids at a Risk board. In one perfectly concise moment, Venis asks, sincerely, 'Do you believe in other people?' If 'Succession' filtered its media satire through family relationships, 'Mountainhead' runs on the dynamics of bro-styled male friendship. There are beefs, hug-it-out moments, passive-aggressive put downs and eruptions of anger. Part of the fun of Armstrong's film isn't just how their behavior spills into a geopolitical events but how it manifests, for example, in which room everyone gets. All of 'Mountainhead' unfolds in the one location, with white mountaintops stretching in the distance outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. It could be a play. Instead, though, it's something that either hardly exists anymore or, maybe, exists everywhere: the made-for-TV movie. There's no lack of films made for streaming services, but many of them fall into some in-between aesthetic that couldn't fill a big screen and feel a touch disposable on the small screen. But 'Mountainhead' adheres to the tradition of the HBO movie; it's lean, topical and a fine platform for its actors. And for Armstrong, it's a way to keep pursuing some of the timely themes of 'Succession' while dispensing lines like: 'Coup-out the U.S.? That's a pretty big enchilada.' 'Mountainhead,' an HBO Films release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 109 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Digital Trends
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
Mountainhead creator says he ‘scraped AI companies back' to make his movie
Mountainhead writer and director Jesse Armstrong has said he's 'pretty sure that the AI companies have been scraping my material along with everyone else's to train their large language models,' and that to find the right voices for the movie's tech-bro characters, 'I've been scraping them back.' Mountainhead, which lands on HBO this weekend, is a dark satire about a group of tech billionaires who retreat to a secluded mountain lodge during a global crisis — a crisis that's exacerbated by their own creations, including highly convincing AI-generated deepfakes and a social media platform that fuels misinformation and instability. Speaking in an interview broadcast on Tuesday by the BBC's The World Tonight, Armstrong said that his 'scraping' process involved accessing large amounts of content online to help him shape the characters' voices, 'especially the tech CEOs and founders, because they all make themselves available on innumerable podcast and TED talks.' The Succession showrunner and co-writer added: 'It was crucial for me to tune into their particular voices, partly the vocabulary, a bit the philosophy, the whole package of how they approach the world with this tremendous confidence. Getting that voice was actually the reason that I pitched the film because I couldn't get that overweening confident voice out of my head, and it's a funny voice because it lacks a certain amount of self-awareness.' AI companies like ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Google, and Meta are known to use (or scrape) online content to train their large language models (LLMs), which power the AI platforms. It's a controversial issue, with creators understandably upset at having their content used without permission, recognition, or payment. On the topic of how generative AI could impact his own industry, Armstrong commented that 'eventually it will be able to do pretty much everything.' When asked if it can already write as well as him, Armstrong laughed, saying, 'People can judge for themselves,' adding, 'At the moment, the part of it which is creative is somewhat limited. Their large language models are predictive and they give you a bit of what you want and a bit of what they think might come next so they're pretty good at mimicry, not great at creativity. But I'm sure that part will come.' Mountainhead premieres on HBO on Saturday, May 31.
