Jesse Armstrong Finds Sympathy for ‘Rich Assholes’ in Mountainhead

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 min ... Read full article.