In the time since Mark Zuckerberg went from public figure to punching bag to increasingly alien Meta overlord, plenty of movies and TV shows have taken inspiration from his Silicon Valley strangeness.
David Fincher and The Social Network took the Facebook magnate down a peg way back in 2010, and it couldn’t have predicted all the strange things he’d get up to after screwing over his business partners. Aaron Sorkin’s sequel, The Social Reckoning, will at least attempt to cover some of the problems he’s faced (and/or created) in October, but many, many more pieces of pop culture have launched their own criticisms of the tech founder—just not using his real name. Here are 12 Zucker-likes, inhuman tech bros who are legally distinct from Mark Zuckerberg.
When Silicon Valley debuted in 2014, the bloom hadn’t quite come off the rose of the HBO comedy’s namesake setting. A Zuckerbergian protagonist like Richard Hendricks could still be plausibly positioned as an underdog, but such was the prescience of the show’s satire that it provided Richard and his offscreen equivalents with a dark vision of their future: Gavin Belson. For six seasons, Matt Ross played the bloviating CEO of fictional tech giant Hooli as pure ego beneath a swept-back hairdo—a man who could not be questioned, but could always be counted on to make the most pointless, faux-philosophical query in any given meeting. Insulated by layers of yes men, Gavin is the kind of clueless “thought leader” who’s so committed to slapping his name on someone else’s work he doesn’t even notice it’s resulted in a giant cock and balls hanging over his head. (And that’s arguably only Silicon Valley‘s second- or third-most elaborate dick joke.) Mike Judge, Alec Berg, and company had to write out Richard’s eccentric underwriter Peter Gregory following the death of actor Christopher Evan Welch between seasons one and two, raising the question of how the show could carry on without its benevolent counterweight to Gavin. The answer: Ross and his hooded glare (is it contemplation? Withering fury? Confusion? All three?) were elevated to the main cast, and Gavin’s brand of billionaire evil became a more powerful force of antagonism for Richard and the Pied Piper team—prescient once again, because the tech world is now all out of Peter Gregorys and up to its quarter-zips in Gavin Belsons. [Erik Adams]
Nathan Bateman, Ex Machina
Yes, the villain of Alex Garland’s Turing test thriller Ex Machina is literally the CEO of a company called BlueBook, but aside from this, his Mark Zuckerberg bona fides are found more in the broad strokes. Oscar Isaac plays Nathan Bateman, a smug tech wunderkind who took a step back from his company in order to focus his attention on far more sinister topics—namely building AI-powered robot women to serve him. While Bateman becomes more of a mad scientist figure in this cat-and-mouse movie, his brand of sci-fi misogyny does seem like the logical near-future endpoint for Zuckerberg, who, in real life, began his career with a website that rated his fellow Harvard students’ attractiveness. At least nobody needs to worry about the sentience of any of the Metaverse’s leg-free avatars. [Jacob Oller]
Wayne Kruger, Person Of Interest
The various “Numbers” Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson ran around investigating in Jonathan Nolan’s underrated CBS technodystopia thriller, masquerading as a rote procedural, ran the gamut from saints to total pieces of shit. But it’s not a coincidence that one of the scuzziest, season three POI Wayne Kruger, was a clear Zuckerberg analog. The CEO of a company called Lifetrace that bills itself as a “people-finding service,” Kruger is, in truth, a rapacious data bandit happy to sell people’s information to the highest bidder, while pulling cheap power moves with his pilfered troves. For a series fixated on the dangers of a computerized surveillance state, Kruger represents the lowest of the low—which means audiences aren’t primed to feel too bad when a disgusted-but-obligated-to-help Caviezel and Emerson fail to save him from his very lethal just rewards. [William Hughes]
Lex Luthor, Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice; Superman (2025)
Zack Snyder’s DCEU often ran counter to the conventional wisdom that four-quadrant superhero movies should please a majority of their audiences. But one of his smartest moves was transforming the smartest man in the world into a friendless, move-fast-and-break-things weirdo who’s obsessed with killing the one guy gifted with all the things he lacks: honor, compassion, and the capacity to love. Snyder’s masterstroke was casting Jesse Eisenberg, still in his Zuckerberg era six years after TheSocial Network, as Lex Luthor in Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. The casting allowed the film’s version of Luthor to bring in the audience’s associations from that previous movie, with all the megalomania that entailed. It was also a portrayal James Gunn was happy to build upon when rebooting the DC films. It would have been easy to give Luthor a Bezos or Musk-styled makeover, but in Superman, Nicholas Hoult’s Luthor dials up the Kryptonian jealousy and social media grievances, with Luthor amassing an army of mind-controlled apes to astroturf the web with anti-Supes propaganda. Talk about art imitating life. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Craig Jergensen, Veep
With his waxy skin, unblinking stare, air of superiority, and hoodie, Tim Baltz channeled the Facebook co-founder to great effect in a guest appearance in Veep season three. As Craig Jergensen, the CEO of the tech conglomerate Clovis, Baltz jockeys for power from the moment he meets Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus); first by showing up late, then cutting her off to have a whisper huddle with his staff, and then demurring when she asks him to do something about his lousy Smartch technology after it pulls up a pornographic site “dedicated” to her. Like the Meta impresario, Baltz also appears to be doing an impression of a human being, and the writing helps land the comparison. Some bits, like Craig’s claim that he doesn’t follow politics, echoed Zuckerberg’s real-life statements, while others, like the line about Clovis being “post-tax,” proved to be prophetic. [Danette Chavez]
Mark Beaks, DuckTales
The 2017 reboot of DuckTales saw a few noticeable changes from its 1980s predecessor, but computers and high-tech gadgets were always a part of the misadventures of Scrooge McDuck and his grandnephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. In a season one episode, the series introduces Mark Beaks (originally named “Mark Zuckerbird”) as a chirpy tech CEO in a sweater who desires nothing more than to be a part of the billionaire’s club Scrooge is a member of. Beaks offers Huey and Dewey the chance to compete for an internship at his tech company Waddle. He’s something of a nonsensical character—he extolls the value of a high five where you don’t need to touch anyone—but with a bit of edgy commentary on his lack of awareness for anyone else but himself (not to mention his obsession with becoming a billionaire). Top it off with Project Tadah, a hyped product that ends up being a ruse to fundraise and fake a robbery, and Beaks is certainly one of the more dastardly characters Scrooge and family has had to deal with. [Monica Castillo]
Boy Kavalier, Alien: Earth
The smugness of youth is on full display in Noah Hawley’s sporadically inspired Alien: Earth series, and he found a perfect vessel for the modern technocracy in Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). The Zuckerbergian update of the series’ sniveling corporate mercenaries, who regularly hurl victims into the xenomorph meat grinder, works like a charm. Tapping into The Social Network‘s portrayal of Zuckerberg as a motormouthed know-it-all with a hoodie-forward fashion sense and tangled head of curly hair, Boy Kavalier has a name as punchable as his face and a vibe more noxious than the series’ killer creatures. Unlike Zuckerberg, though, Kavalier has another interest outside of smoking meats and controlling the minds and wallets of every human on Earth: Like many other billionaires, Kavalier is a podcaster, who spends his downtime reciting J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan into a microphone while naming projects, buildings, and replicants after his favorite characters. Hawley takes many liberties with the Alien franchise, but as far as corporate satire goes, he downloaded the right parts into a symbol of all that’s wrong with our techno overlords. [MS]
Peter Isherwell, Don’t Look Up
A mix of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs with a David Byrne sheen, Peter Isherwell is the petulant billionaire CEO of a cell phone company in 2021’s Don’t Look Up. While the public sees him as an affable, harmless eccentric, Peter is actually an unrelentingly profit-driven company head who’s willing to put the Earth at risk of an extinction-level event to make even more money. As a top donor to the floundering president (Meryl Streep), Peter uses his money to bend her political will to his favor. Upon discovering there’s rare minerals in a comet heading to earth, he talks her into accepting a risky plan to save the minerals but jeopardize the planet, and when things don’t go according to plan, he uses his money to protect himself and escape the consequences while the rest of the earth is left behind to survive the blast. Mark Rylance plays Peter like a coin, flipping between extremes of quirkiness and singular ruthless focus with almost alarming ease. Humanity never stood a chance. [MC]
Technical Boy, American Gods
Technically, as a character in the 2001 fantasy novel American Gods, Technical Boy was already lording over technology and the internet before Mark Zuckerberg even matriculated at Harvard. But the New God of Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s TV adaptation is cast more in the mold of a 21st-century technocrat than the round-cheeked basement-dwelling type of the book, vaping synthetic toad skin in the stretchiest limo ever and spouting babble like “We have reprogrammed reality. Language is a virus, religion an operating system, and prayers are just so much fucking spam.” Style-wise, Technical Boy is still leagues ahead of Zuck even after his chain-wearing makeover, but, as the show progressed, the deity fought off pretenders to his tech throne and bent the knee to an even bigger braggart. All that’s missing is an island home. [DC]
The Analyst, The Matrix Resurrections
By the time Lana Wachowski returned for a two-decades-later coda to her and her sister’s Matrix trilogy, the internet had changed. Users were now nestled firmly in their algorithmic pods, draining their mental resources to power the tech companies that had laid claim to the once free and open World Wide Web. The machines have won, and as long as everyone has a little feed to scroll through, they’re more than happy to give up the freedom of choice Neo (Keanu Reeves) fought so tirelessly for. It only makes sense that the villain of the new film wouldn’t be a rogue program escaping obsolescence, but a corporate-friendly avatar for the algorithm itself. Arriving in the wake ofMeta’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Analyst (a smug Neil Patrick Harris) is the embodiment not of Zuckerberg the man, but of what Zuck created: a psychologically manipulative algorithm that keeps people trapped in an echo chamber that controls via feelings, not bodies. Incorporating hints of Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg into his disaffected and snide disposition, Harris has the Silicon Valley air of believing he knows best, making it all the more enjoyable when Trinity and Neo prevail. [MS]
Raymond Sellars, RoboCop
In the 2014 RoboCop remake, Michael Keaton plays Raymond Sellars, the CEO of OmniCorp who sees an opportunity in the same rise of crime that has left poor Alex Murphy barely living. Sellars champions the creation of the RoboCop, giving Murphy a new lease on life in a mechanical android suit fit for fighting crime. The CEO is cold and calculating until he loses his grip on his emotions when facing the possibility that his invention may not have the ROI he thought it would. He can’t imagine the human inside the machine as having any kind of free will—the kind of profits-over-people mentality that’s put plenty of corporate villains at odds with film heroes, but has only become more tech-centric (and on the nose regarding our own subservience to devices) over the last decade. [MC]
Everybody, Mountainhead
It’s easy to get distracted, while watching Jesse Armstrong’s nasty little Succession follow-up, to get bogged down in a game of Pin The Fictitious Analogue On The Billionaire. Cory Michael Smith’s Ven carries a whiff of Elon Musk as both the richest of the film’s assembled mega-rich and the most painfully unfunny. (We’re introduced to him debating the comedy merits of tweeting out a planet-endangering social media launch with a message of “fuuck” vs. “fuuuck.”) But while it’s easy to see shades of Peter Thiel in Steve Carell’s health-obsessed investor, or Sam Altman in Ramy Youssef’s AI-minded Jeff, there’s a healthy strain of Zuckerberg running through all of these yapping lapdogs with alpha aspirations. It’s present most especially in the insecure jockeying for position and power that makes up the bulk of the film’s deliberately dispassionate drama, each guy presenting himself as the underappreciated, beleaguered underdog one second, and making moves to screw over (or worse) his “buddies” the next. A famous film once asserted you can’t make 500 million friends without making a few enemies; Mountainhead posits that, with four “friends” all poured from this particular gormless mold, who needs enemies at all? [WH]
Keep scrolling for more great stories.