General Discussion

Entertainment /
Film /
Movie Review
Mountainhead succeeds at showing you how truly deranged the billionaire mindset can be
HBO’s Mountainhead is a snapshot of everything that’s ridiculous and terrible about Silicon Valley’s billionaire class.

by Charles Pulliam-Moore

May 30, 2025, 11:30 AM CDT


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.

-snip-