Back in 2013, a handful of enterprising dudes who had started a tech world–adjacent event company called Summit paid $40 million for Powder Mountain, a Utah ski resort that had fallen into foreclosure. “This is no ordinary real estate project,” their announcement read at the time. “It’s an effort to create an epicenter of culture, innovation, and thought-leadership.” The ski-bootstrappin’ bros dreamed loudly and proudly of the possibilities for their nü-elite alpine utopia. It would have fresh pow, sick recording studios, and spaces to “host micro-conferencing and peace and reconciliation talks.” The way they described that last part made me imagine Lech Walesa holding a powerful summit there someday, or maybe even Andy Cohen.
A few years after buying the place, the Summit gang showed a reporter from The Guardian around the newish digs and hailed the “exponential opportunities” that their high-altitude enclave might provide. “I have this whole rap with Gertrude Stein, Katharine Graham, de’ Medici, Bauhaus,” babbled one of the founders, really taking the concept of visionary to another level. “There’s this rich history of groups coming together, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, right?” With math like that, it checks out that by 2023, Summit’s endeavor was reported to be around $100 million in debt. That’s according to multibillionaire Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings, who swooped in and acquired the controlling stake in the resort for himself. Since then, Hastings has been investing in new ski lifts while trying to make even more of the mountain members-only. Now that’s high agency, baby!
I mention all of this because I found myself reminiscing about the whole PowMow circle of life while watching Mountainhead, the made-for-HBO film written and directed by Succession’s Jesse Armstrong that happens to feature a handful of entrepreneurial cyber-machers surveying snowy Utah landscapes, vision-questioning their futures, and dropping names.
Mountainhead, which stars Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, and Jason Schwartzman as three billionaires and one ho-hum half-billion-dollar tryhard, is a proud work of fiction—a by-design farce. I’ve been saying for years now that I wanted to see a wintry White Lotus season at the Yellowstone Club, and while I’m still patiently waiting, Armstrong’s work explores a similar space in his own distinct voice. Mountainhead raises an important question I’ve been meaning to ask: What if the Pied Piper bois of Silicon Valley missed their reservation at that restaurant from The Menu because their private jets accidentally got routed through Years and Years’ dystopian airspace? What then? Its answer involves a bowling ball, an ominous sauna, AI deepfakes, a cherub in a Moncler onesie, the assassination of the mayor of Paris, references to planet Earth as “this fuckin’ rock” and “a fine starter planet,” death sentences, eternal consciousness uploaded to the cloud, and the importance of the global trade of cheese. Sounds about right.
Mountainhead is a pileup of the countless sad, bad truths about the people who get to paw at the levers labeled Money Spigot and Humanity’s Future, both in its fictional universe and in our own real world. Watching it made me chuckle about high-concept, high-altitude real estate squabbles from days gone by … and also made me cringe about all the drama to come in some AI-besotted future. Its themes intertwine with the latest smug DOGE mess and scary new legislation, as well as “NoLIta crypto torture” headlines. (I suspect even Armstrong would hesitate to throw a bathrobe, an Italian, a “crypto king of Kentucky,” a forgotten $600 Blue Ribbon Sushi delivery, and custom gag T-shirts into the same plot. It’s nice to still find surprise in this world.)
Much like its characters, Mountainhead isn’t pleasant; much like its characters, it is persistent. Which is fitting, because at its core, the project revolves around—and draws from—the world’s most renewable resource: a buncha dudes high on their own supply, permanently fueled by their own garbage.
Schwartzman wasn’t fully sure what he was getting into when he signed on to play Hugo Van Yalk. His character represented an ancient, almost archetypical type of guy—the one with less money than everyone else in his desired orbit. He’s portrayed as the insecure host of a four-man poker night that reunites a group of old frenemies/coinvestors/rivals who call themselves the Brewsters and seem to have met somewhere along their go-to-market journeys. (They have a very Y Combinator-y feel to me.) Joining him are a character named Randall (Carell), whom the guys also call Papa Bear; a faux-humble rising star named Jeff (Youssef), who developed AI real-or-not detection tech that he calls a “filter for nightmares”; and Venis (Smith), the richest and seemingly most clueless man in the world. They all refer to Schwartzman’s character with the term of endearment “Soupy,” short for “soup kitchen.” Thanks to his business—a mid meditation app called Slowzo—he’s worth some $500,000,000.
But Schwartzman knew Mountainhead sought to capture the zeitgeist of newer, more unknowable concepts like AI. The technology haunts Mountainhead like a sorry-not-sorry specter, fomenting mayhem and violence and financial market meltdowns that are always just out of frame. Characters fixate on futuristic notions like accelerationism and advances in transhuman technology. Speaking over Zoom with The Ringer earlier this month, Schwartzman told me what he told Armstrong: “You know, I know very little about … certain elements that are in this movie. Do you have any type of, like, recommendations for me? Like a book I could read or a movie I should watch?”
And boy, did Armstrong ever. “A Dropbox link,” Schwartzman recalled, looking stricken. “It’s like, so many books. It’s 50 books, 100 articles, 2,000 hours of podcasts. I was like, oh boy, this is going to be tough.” (Of all the occupational hazards that go along with being an actor—the rejection, the sudden fame, the faraway shoots, all that time in the gym—the one nobody warns you about is staring down the barrel of an All-In podcast backlog.) In a way, the volume of information was freeing; Schwartzman knew he’d be in good, if obsessive, hands. Armstrong “knows so much about it in a way that I will never know as deeply,” Schwartzman said, “because he’s been spending so much time with it.”
Time, in the case of Mountainhead, is relative. When I asked my typical introductory question to the actors about the first description they received of the project, Smith, who plays Venis, laughed. “Luckily, I remember everything,” he said, “because it was three months ago.” He’s not exaggerating: Mountainhead was pitched, green-lit, shot, edited, and released in the span of months—not the usual years. When Smith signed on, eager to work with the man behind Succession, the script hadn’t even been finished yet.
Why the rush? Especially when Armstrong is a debut director? To an extent, that second question partly answers the first: Armstrong told Bloomberg that he preferred not to have to spend too much time ruminating on the directorial craft. More important for him was wanting his film to be able to meet its own moment. He knew how quickly the world could render precision obsolete. “The character dynamics are timeless, but I also think it’s really important that we get it out timely,” said Youssef. “That's how Jesse really explained it. He was just like, look, this tech is growing so quickly. Let's talk about it while it’s in the most nascent state that it’ll be in.”
The sped-up timeline makes more sense when you know that for Armstrong, this actually wasn’t some sudden idea. By the time he presented his vision to HBO, he’d been marinating in thoughts about a certain genre of mover and shaker for more than a year. That Dropbox didn’t compile itself.
A few months after Armstrong wrapped the fourth and final season of his snide starmaker Succession in 2023, he accepted a freelance book review gig from the Times Literary Supplement. His assignment was to opine on Going Infinite, the new Michael Lewis book about the rise and fall of noted cryptocurrency nerdpin Sam Bankman-Fried. “Horace Walpole noted that the world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel,” Armstrong wrote in his essay, published in November 2023, right around the time Bankman-Fried was being found guilty of fraud in federal court. “You could easily make a savage satire on the crazy snakes and ladders of the crypto wild west described in Going Infinite,” he continued. “But if you have a feeling for the lives of these young people, it is a tragedy, too.”
Researching Bankman-Fried, Armstrong went down the strange rabbit hole of the tech and tech-adjacent podcastverse. He became transfixed by what felt like a form of expression all its own: the very specific cadence, and the terms. So many terms, always catching on and gaining steam and being parroted and getting played out.
“First principles,” said Youssef, naming one. “Steelman. Unfalsifiable. Deepfakes.” The vernacular is what makes Mountainhead such a squirmy watch. Usually, when I hear people talk like this, I turn the channel or sidle someplace else. When Succession was on TV, I used to understand, but not agree with, the criticism that said: You want me to sit here and watch these unlikable people? My dirty secret was that I liked them all just fine. But not so much in Mountainhead. The first time I watched it was with a scowl.
“They call themselves the smartest men in the world,” Youssef said about the characters. “And they’re so not, right?” Papa Bear rattles off facile and esoteric stats alike—10 people have heart attacks during the Super Bowl every year! No country with an internationally traded consumer cheese has ever defaulted on its national debt!—then basks in the glory he feels he’s owed for that Snapple-lid intellect. The characters discuss the mounting global chaos like it’s a board game, dismissing one country as “de minimis.”
Unbearable? Sure—but so are the people the project is inspired by. You know, the ones with all the societal power who still feel as though they have something to prove. “It's interesting to watch people speak in this high-tech world with its language and its rules,” Youssef said. “Even though it’s stiff, it’s oddly emotional. You can kind of sense underneath it, even in the most bland podcast, you can kind of sense underneath some of these guys’ voices: Do you guys love me NOW?” The second time I watched Mountainhead, I was still annoyed by all the crazy snakes and ladders. But I found I’d started sensing the little tragedies underneath them, too.
In some senses, Armstrong really isn’t so different from a successful TED Talkin’ tech founder. He has a trusted team of collaborators with whom he prefers to operate and execute on his strategic vision. (They include Succession alums like Frank Rich, Will Tracy, and Lucy Prebble, as well as composer Nicholas Britell, who provided what Armstrong described as a “technofeudalism” sonic touch.) He has a strategic vision, even if he makes you believe otherwise. “He’s so inclusive, so collaborative, so kind,” Schwartzman said. “Listens to your ideas! He’s up for listening to you and trying what you would like. At the same time, it’s so singularly his thing.”
And above all, the way he describes that singular thing sounds a lot like someone getting down to first principles—even if he’d never put it that way. “Logical propositions taken to their illogical, extreme expressions is a great area for comedy,” Armstrong said. “And so is that uncharted territory, or the uncharted midpoint, where confidence turns into arrogance.”
Mountainhead’s importance lies in its immediacy. It’s a map, not a journey. The other day, Netflix announced a new series called The Altruists, based on the story of Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, and it served as a reminder of how long stories usually take to make it to screen when you don’t have the juice to move fast and break things.
When I told Armstrong that I spent a month covering Bankman-Fried’s trial, he asked me: “Do you think there’s a part of him that was for real about effective altruism?”
Sure, I do. One primary source document that makes me feel this way is Bankman-Fried’s abandoned Blogspot. It was mostly about baseball sabermetrics—except that little by little, you could see his entry-level curiosity in things like utilitarianism (and, almost immediately, effective altruism) creep in. Everything about that pipeline seems pretty for real to me. Which is why it also seems for real that somewhere along the way, the pipeline blew up into something more destructive.
In Bankman-Fried’s case, the foundations of the EA philosophy turned into a flywheel: both an access point to and a justification for the accumulation of unfathomable riches that put Bankman-Fried in proximity to some really smart people (and power). Shortly after Armstrong’s book review was published, a different Sam—Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI—became a household name, too. If crypto was the Wild West when Armstrong wrote the piece, AI is now the one with all the horses. And just as I looked back on Bankman-Fried’s old blog, I also recently came across some old Altman lore that served as a reminder of how wildly things evolve. “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king,” wrote Paul Graham, a Papa Bear in his own right, about his protégé.
That was in 2008—back when Altman was wearing double popped collars and trying to make his location app Loopt happen. I’m glad (“glad”) we have the reminder of what cannibal kings looked like back then, even if it couldn’t stop them from turning into their more malignant forms.
Like any good farce, Mountainhead devolves into rowdy, inventive violence. At one point, the Brewsters hold the closest thing to the intellectual salon and the poker game once envisioned by Soupy as they argue and banter about how, whether, and why they’d murder one of their own in order to obtain access to his killer app. (This is the part of the movie that got me reading about the NoLIta crypto torture; you both can and can’t make this stuff up.)
“On utilitarian grounds,” one of them says, “if we agree that the greatest happiness for the greatest number occurs in the absence of Jeff, then logically the question is not why would we kill Jeff, but why wouldn’t we?” Another pipes up: “Morally, I personally would have to be able to prove on first principles that his death would save a net multiplicity of future lives.”
The conversation, like so much of Mountainhead, made me feel like I was reading Bankman-Fried’s Signal history, or listening to Jordan Peterson debate children, or attending a reconciliation summit at an entrepreneurial epicenter. Which meant it was right on the money.
