Hollywood’s love affair with the unassailable tech-industry genius is officially over. After a high-profile trio of breakup movies—The Social Reckoning, Artificial, and Musk—there are few prominent tech figures left who will walk away without some critical movie pointing out how their products have deceived or hurt people, manipulated their audiences and friends alike, and how the businessmen themselves have shirked responsibility when things went wrong. Now the once-lauded idea of the Silicon Valley scion has moved closer to the image of the Bond villain—either a joke of his former self or a robotic judge, jury, and executioner, rather than the hero of their own stories.
In rosier, more innocent (or naïve) times, industry figureheads like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—in their near-mythical rise from garage tinkerers to CEOs of multimillion-dollar companies—became the stuff of screen-ready Horatio Alger legends. As far back as the late 1990s, the battle between the little upstart who could, Jobs (Noah Wyle), and the established PC king, Gates (Anthony Michael Hall), became fodder for the made-for-TV movie Pirates Of Silicon Valley. Their struggle was depicted as a battle between two brilliant minds, but both were seen as benevolent agents of change in the race towards the digital age.
Other breathless biopics about Jobs followed—the Ashton Kutcher-starring Jobs and Michael Fassbender-led Steve Jobs—but with The Social Network, David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin finally picked at some of the darkness below the surface of these shiny startup offices. They found a selfishness and lack of self-awareness that paved the way for a new kind of tech figure to step forward in film. Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) isn’t treated as glowingly as Jobs, possibly because Facebook’s behind-the-scenes drama was just as much a part of its foundational story as its original intention: to rate the hot girls at Harvard. Zuckerberg didn’t seem interested in creating a Walt-Disney-like origin story led by vision and purpose nor did he fit into the mode of a bootstrapping underdog like Steve Jobs, leaving other storytellers the space to fill in the blanks.
The Social Reckoning may lack the finesse of The Social Network, but it is even more critical about the immature guys playing god with what people see on social media. Its heroes instead are a journalist (Jeremy Allen White) and a whistleblower (Mikey Madison) who, despite raising her concerns that the platform is having a negative effect on its users, went unheard because the algorithm worked the way Zuckerberg mandated it: to prioritize shares and engagement, often riding on the coattails of ragebait to juice the numbers.
For his part, Zuckerberg, as Jeremy Strong plays him in the film, is relatively one-note—so wholly focused on success, he can’t or won’t jeopardize it for any other cause. Where The Social Network tried to understand the man behind the headlines, by The Social Reckoning, Sorkin sees Zuckerberg as fully disconnected from humanity, practically uninterested in anyone else to an almost comical degree. In the movie, he’s more a representative for the out-of-touch tech overlords who are squeezing our attention spans to their limit, tinkering with our feeds so we see ads for junk and influencers instead of our friends. Zuckerberg is revered within the company, with a certain level of pageantry involved just to be graced by his awkward presence, but to the rest of the world, he’s become a weird enigma, devoid of any understanding towards the very people he lords over. The Social Reckoning draws a direct correlation between the January 6th capital riots, the explosion of far-right groups, and the spread of misinformation on Facebook. But when push comes to shove, and those around Zuckerberg demand he take action to stem the crisis, he shrugs off responsibility, insisting his company is not in the business of censorship.
It’s here that Reckoning shares its views with Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, which also happens to have some roots in The Social Network. Andrew Garfield first entered into Silicon Valley cinema playing Eduardo Saverin, an early investor in Facebook who Zuckerberg unceremoniously pushed out for the supposedly cooler and savvier Sean Parker. Saverin’s tragic, Julius Caesar-like arc is much more nuanced than the mustache-twirling persona Garfield employs as Sam Altman in Artificial, which barely hides its filmmakers’ contempt for (and perhaps fascination with) this character’s selfishness.
Artificial is mostly centered on Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov), one of the minds behind the advancement of AI whose idealism sheltered him from seeing his control over the untested product slip away in the name of profit. Garfield’s Altman is a slippery character, one who sets himself up to be everyone’s friend, cozying up to Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz) for his capital, before pushing the startup he co-founded with Sutskever, OpenAI, to strike out on their own.
In true Bond-villain fashion, Altman has his own bunker under his Napa Valley estate, hiding his true concerns about what he’s done from the rest of the world. He’s not shy about playing with people’s emotions in the movie or in real life, as he does in the unabashedly laudatory The AI Doc: How I Became An Apocaloptimist. There, more than the other tech experts in the documentary, Altman charms his interviewer and relates to him as a parent. It’s a brief reminder of how tech scions were once celebrated figures in their industry, a perspective Artificial is wholly uninterested in continuing.
In Artificial, Altman uses his connections in and outside the company to hold onto power and push products out before they pass safety checks. He embodies the old Facebook motto of “Move fast and break things” to its darkest endpoint, where users suffer psychotic breaks and get their suicide letters proofread by ChatGPT. Guadagnino positions Ilya and his mentor Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance) as the kinds of people who were once celebrated in movies about good-hearted, ambitious inventors. Nowadays, their kind are steamrolled in a cutthroat, unregulated tech world, which rewards testing so-called innovations on an unsuspecting public. When trouble arises with an unchecked new gadget, Altman feigns helpless, unable to fix any of the problems he’s caused by rushing OpenAI; he’s incapable of taking any responsibility, but excited to take all of the credit.
Musk, who plays a supporting role in the story of OpenAI, recently got a documentary focusing on his own life, tracing the ultimate transformation of a celebrated tech figurehead to a hollow meme of his former self—a dangerous person who views others as lesser beings. In Alex Gibney’s barnburner Musk, hours and hours of recorded conversations and quotes are assembled into an AI avatar who reiterates Musk’s own words as if sitting down for an interview (something the real-life Musk refused to give Gibney).
Gibney admits to once being a fan of Musk’s Teslas, but Gibney had made several documentaries casting a critical eye towards the so-called “smartest guys in the room”—he was well aware that there was enough self-incriminating evidence against Musk to make clear what a menace he’d become in the span of a few decades. From his petty backroom deals, corporate coups, and pandemic-era shift into right-wing ideology, Musk’s recent history is laid out over the course of four hours, which is a feat in itself. Aside from Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos case, few other tech figures have been taken to task so thoroughly for lying to their fans and investors, but only Musk has the distinction of being responsible for deaths due to the overhyped capabilities of Teslas, his meddling in the war in Ukraine through StarLink, and his meddling with government aid through DOGE.
Musk was once such a prominent and tolerated figure in Hollywood that he made a cameo in Iron Man 2 and earned praise on The Simpsons, but that love affair soured since the COVID-19 pandemic, when Musk’s racism only became louder, his conspiracy theories more prominent, and his far-right politics inescapable. Now, with one long-running documentary, Gibney deflates the Musk myth for those who somehow haven’t seen all of the headlines.
In The Social Reckoning, Artificial, and Musk, there’s no mistaking who the bad guys are: They’re the ones trying to shape our world of tomorrow. Films once treated their brilliance with the kind of reverence once saved for hagiographies of inventors like Thomas Edison; now documentaries and dramas alike highlight these men’s many wrongdoings. Flaming the fires of fascism on their platforms, harming their users’ mental health, and lying about their products’ safety features has finally made their villainous nature clear to Hollywood. At their core, this new generation of real-world antagonists have much in common: They value profits over public well-being and they will work overtime to avoid any culpability for the fallout of their decisions. Far from being positioned as the bright-eyed idealists of the first generation of Silicon Valley innovators, films now see them as cowardly and dangerous for how much control they hold over an unsuspecting global audience.
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