“Mountainhead” Shows How “Nothing Means Anything” To Silicon Valley’s Billionaire CEOs
The sky is blue. This metaphor has become a cliché when discussing ideas that are obviously true and that everyone in our society should agree upon. However, the truth of the sky’s color is more complex than it might appear at first. The sky frequently appears to be pink or orange at dawn or dusk, or black or grey during a thunderstorm or the night.
Truth and reality are often nuanced and complicated. Without rigorous checks and safeguards, it can be easy for people who have unreliable information and bad actors to take a piece of something that is seemingly true, distort it, and make others in our society believe it. While this distortion of truth has occurred throughout human history, the rise of the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence (AI) has made this problem significantly worse in recent years due to deliberate design choices. These technologies are bringing out the darkest, most destructive elements of human nature because the billionaire CEOs of Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley want to manipulate and exploit the rest of us.
Thus, the release of HBO Max’s new movie “Mountainhead” this past weekend could not be more timely. The piece of satirical fiction centers around three billionaire tech CEOs — Randall, Jeff, and Venis — who spend the weekend with their centimillionaire friend Hugo at his mansion Mountainhead in the Utah mountains. Throughout the movie, these four men repeatedly show that they view violence, racism, genocide, and societal collapse not as unfortunate side effects of their companies’ products, but as a gateway for creating a new world order dominated by chaos where they can topple economies and nation states and become all-powerful rulers.
And it is more than obvious that these CEOs cannot keep up with the chaos. They repeatedly chat about whether the videos of fires, exploding heads, and severed feet that they are seeing pour in on their social media feeds are real. Yet, even as this chaos confuses and disturbs them, they also seem to revel in it. They have banter about the sexual extortion of minors, saying “You only build a pedophile lair once. No, seriously, make those kids happy,” and acknowledge that one’s wealth comes from another “because of all the deaths from your launch.”
The climax of this conversation comes after Jeff — the most idealistic member of the group — repeatedly expresses qualms about these technologies’ impacts. Venn responds that: “We’re going to show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing is that fuckin’ serious. Yeah, nothing means anything, and everything’s funny and cool.”
“Nothing means anything” is the phrase that I would say best captures the essence of “Mountainhead” and why the real-life Silicon Valley billionaire ethos that it satires is so scary. If this is true, then not only does a shared sense of reality not exist — it doesn’t even matter.
While real life billionaires like former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X CEO Elon Musk, or others may never take a weekend retreat together and we may never have privy to much of what they say in private, their public remarks and actions strongly imply that they would hold similar attitudes. Thiel is well-known for saying that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” allying himself with Curtis Yarvin, an influential computer programmer who believes in a return to monarchy, and donating millions to U.S. candidates that spread lies about election outcomes. Zuckerberg made business plans to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and engage in censorship to penetrate the Chinese market (despite claiming to shareholders and the American public that he wouldn’t), refused to change Facebook algorithms that drove political division and hate even after they caused a genocide in Myanmar, and knowlingly continued to use Instagram algorithms that pushed pro-eating disorder content to teenage girls. And Musk has warped the functioning of the social media company X (formerly Twitter) after purchasing it and becoming its CEO to amplify misleading election claims, antisemitism, and otherwise hateful or false content. Perhaps one of the most dramatic consequences of this could be seen in April when X became a hotbed for spreading false information about President Donald Trump’s tariffs that caused a $2 trillion market swing.
These are not the actions of men who want to connect the world and make more profit for their companies. Their choices profit from division and disinformation, creating chaos and hurting the everyday people who they view as powerless to stop them.
The battle for democracy is playing out in our online information ecosystem. Silicon Valley’s billionaire CEOs are reshaping the public square in ways that erode our ability to discern truth from fiction. Without shared facts, we can’t make collective decisions, hold power to account, or even agree on the problems we face. Reestablishing a shared reality isn’t just a cultural priority — it’s a democratic imperative. We must demand greater transparency and accountability from the social media publishers that shape our world. Only then can we protect democracy from being broken — and rebuilt — by a handful of unelected billionaires.
 | A guest post by
|
It was a MOVIE, not a documentary. I didn’t love it. But just casually dismissing the jaw dropping philanthropy of people like Steve Jobs and others is ridiculous. Grasping at straws.