Jesse Armstrong hadn’t planned on making another project about billionaires.
The Succession creator was taking a break after finishing HBO’s Emmy-winning series about the ludicrously wealthy siblings fighting for control over their father’s media conglomerate, which ended in May 2023. But while writing a review of journalist Michael Lewis’ book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, about crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, Armstrong got sucked into listening to podcasts featuring tech elites. It inspired him to write and direct his first feature: Mountainhead, a movie about three tech billionaires and their less rich, deeply insecure friend, all of whom have far too much power at their disposal.
“I couldn’t get the … tech voice, tech man voice, a billionaire, out of my head,” Armstrong says, noting that to him, that voice embodies both “supreme confidence in their analytical abilities” and “arrogance.” Armstrong is being nice here. The word that repeatedly came to my mind while watching the foursome trade jargon, insults, and delusions of grandeur for the movie’s nearly two-hour run time was douchebag.
The film, which will start streaming on HBO May 31, stars Steve Carell as venture capitalist Randall; Jason Schwartzman as Hugo Van Yalk, whose nickname “Souper” is a reference to a soup kitchen—and his lower net worth; Cory Michael Smith as Venis, a Zuck-Elon figure unleashing hyperrealistic deepfakes on his platform Traam; and Ramy Youssef as Jeff, who plans on profiting big from releasing AI that can counter the chaos his pal Venis is wreaking on the world.
The friends meet up for a retreat in the mountains, hosted by Souper, whose fixation on impressing the cohort with his home decor and food platters is met with scorn by the others. They have a “no deals, no meals, no high heels” rule for the weekend. But the fun—in their case, snowmobiling to a peak and writing their net worths on their chests with lipstick—is eventually superseded by plots to take over the world and “coup out the US.”
Mountainhead came together in just a few months, against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s second term in office, much of which has been dominated by Elon Musk’s DOGE mission. Shooting took place over a few weeks this spring. While Carell says there were upsides to the tight turnaround—“everyone’s just trusting their gut”—Schwartzman says quickly attaining fluency in the “tech voice” Armstrong was going for was a challenge for him.
“At a certain point I said to Jesse, if you ever want us to say anything extra, do you have a glossary or a dictionary,” Schwartzman says. “It’s like if you were doing a movie in French and then improvise something in Italian.”
While Armstrong acknowledges that some people might react to his latest project by asking, “Why should I care about these rich assholes,” he refrains from outright making a judgment about them.
“I do feel some sympathy for the real people grappling with some of this tech, because it is a bit of a hall of mirrors,” Armstrong says. “Lots of people go into, especially AI, with a sense of the power of the technology, and I think, as far as I can tell, a genuine sense of responsibility.”