Don’t Bother Scaling This Mountain

What HBO’s new film Mountainhead gets wrong about the role of tech in our politics, society, and lives.

I watched the new movie Mountainhead from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong over the weekend. As a way to kill two hours before the Knicks game started, it was fine. But the movie was meant to offer scathing social commentary on the role of tech in our lives and society. And on that front, the movie got it wrong.

The premise is four tech execs get together for a weekend in one of their lavish homes in Utah just as the wealthiest of the group launched an AI tool that makes creating compelling deepfakes incredibly easy, sparking sectarian violence and war across the globe. As the world collapses, the group mainly debates how to profit even more from it rather than how to stop the bloodshed. They are seen as the true powers behind everything and openly discuss overthrowing governments from Argentina to the U.S. And in the end (spoiler alert), no one really gets their comeuppance other than the fact that we’re supposed to feel mollified that their lives are ultimately miserable. 

The first problem with the premise is that it’s just wrong. Yes, there are incredibly powerful tech CEOs and that’s why we need laws and lawsuits to rein in their power ranging from repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to more antitrust prosecutions against Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google. 

However, compare the movie to reality. The tech CEOs are not the true powers. Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos are all supplicants to Donald Trump. He says bark and they immediately turn into circus performers. If they were ultimately in charge, they’d be treating the president like the tech bros do in the movie — cavalierly — rather than showering him with endless money and praise. 

The richest and most powerful of all of them — Elon Musk — aligned himself with Trump on the front end, which seemed smart. His last day of work in Washington DC was Friday. He’s going home with a destroyed reputation, a car company in the toilet and a literal black eye. Washington chewed him up and spit him out. The great disruptor had no clue what he was up against and he failed miserably. That’s actual reality happening right now. The movie would make you think the opposite is true.

The more important point though is the underlying nature and intentions of tech founders in the first place. My job is to invest in and work with early stage startups in highly regulated industries. Every single day, I meet with tech founders who have a disruptive idea and know they have to work through regulation, government, laws, politics, media and entrenched interests to advance their concept. 

Here’s what I almost never encounter: long screeds about the evils of regulation, libertarian manifestos, and utter disregard for society, laws and people (and keep in mind, most of them know me as the guy who defeats tech regulation so if anything, they’re incentivized to act like the tech bros in the movie). 

Yes, they want to run their companies freely. But mainly, they just want the chance to compete and the rules to be fair and applied fairly across the board. They’re not looking to undermine civilization. In most cases, they believe — right or wrong — that they have a product that will help people, that will make their lives easier or more fun or healthier or less expensive. Most founders I meet would shudder in horror at the behavior of the protagonists of the movie. It’s the opposite of what they believe and how they behave. 

Of course there are tech founders who act like schmucks. Plenty of them. There are socialists who act like schmucks. Democrats. Republicans. Media personalities. Hollywood executives. Wall Street titans. Athletes. Artists. Journalists. Non-profit executives. University presidents. It’s a segment of every sector and every corner of humanity. 

And like every single sector, the tech industry needs regulation. Sometimes regulations turn out to be good. Sometimes they’re not. The point is to balance the opportunity any product or service offers consumers with the harm it could also cause and use regulation to maximize the gain and minimize the risk. That’s what being thoughtful means. It doesn’t mean attacking business and innovation at all times and it doesn’t mean attacking government and structure at all times. 

Regulation is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. It’s a tool to find the right balance to generate the greatest benefit to society. Finding the right balance often requires debate and disagreement, but almost no one I encounter questions the underlying need for it in the first place. 

The characters of Mountainhead clearly don’t understand this. But in real life, most tech founders do.