‘Succession’ creator’s new moguls are tech gods gazing down from ‘Mountainhead’

Jesse Armstrong has been thinking a lot about billionaires.

The creator of HBO’s Succession has written and directed a new movie — Mountainhead — about four uber-rich leaders of tech. They’ve assembled at a mountaintop chateau for what’s supposed to be a weekend of poker and conversation — an “intellectual salon,” as Jason Schwartzman’s character Hugo Van Yalk puts it.

Meanwhile, the world below them is falling into chaos. They watch news reports of mass executions, governments toppling — all because one of them, Venis, owns a social networking company that’s made sharing deep-fake videos very easy.

As Venis’s rival, Jeff, puts it: “Now you’ve inflamed a volatile situation, and people are using generative AI to circulate hyper-personalized messages, unfalsifiable deep-fakes… promoting genocidal proximate attacks, creating sectarian division with video evidence, massive market instability, fraud!”

The question at the heart of Mountainhead is this: What do these tech gods do about the carnage while watching from their Mount Olympus?

As Jesse Armstrong told Morning Edition host A Martínez, “When you’re on yachts and in private jets and in gated communities, you are physically removed from your fellow human beings. That has a psychological effect, I think.”

Armstrong says the central relationship in the film is between Venis (played by Cory Michael Smith) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who’s developed an AI application that might solve Venis’s problem. But Jeff is being coy about whether or not they’ll partner up. “On one level,” Armstrong said, “he’s the worst in that he could help stop the worst things that are happening in the world if he was to cooperate. Now, whether Jeff trusts Venis is a question. He is unwilling just to roll the dice in the hope that his friend will act in a way that’s beneficial to humanity.”

The patriarch of the group is Randall (Steve Carell), a venture capitalist who’s guided them to their wealth. As they consider solutions to the crisis, they’re also considering ways they can take financial advantage of the situation. At one point, Randall says, “That’s why I’m so excited about these atrocities!”

“There’s a spectrum of behaviors,” Armstrong said of his four main characters. “On one end, you have confidence, which is probably a positive quality one needs to get through life. And the extreme version of that is arrogance. Where each of them falls on that spectrum, the viewer can decide — but they think they have the solutions and they would like to apply them to the world. That requires a great degree of confidence. And maybe you see when that confidence tips over into arrogance in this film.”

Armstrong likens that extreme confidence to some of today’s real-life tech leaders. “They are at a frontier of knowledge which is shaping our world, and they rightly think that they know more about that on the whole than we do. So the level of trust that we’re being asked to put in them is enormous… We really have got nothing to do other than hope that these people, to some degree, have the rest of humanity’s best interests in mind.”

The audio version of this story was produced by Ana Perez. The digital version was edited by Olivia Hampton.