Villains in movies used to move in the shadows, cloaked in black, a scar hinting at some violent history. Now they’re wearing a quarter-zip fleece or a soft-shell vest and lurking behind a laptop.
As the power and influence of tech billionaires—and their threat that AI could kill off humanity—draw the world’s attention, Hollywood is examining the real-life individuals who have become such larger-than-life characters that they warrant a two-hour (or, in one case, nearly four-hour) movie.
Four films landing in theaters or at festivals within weeks of each other center on controversial individuals who rose to achieve power and wealth in Silicon Valley. There is Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a companion piece to The Social Network, another film he wrote (based on Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires); in the new project, Jeremy Strong takes over the role of Mark Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, for a story about the whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who exposed some of Facebook’s darkest internal research. There is Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s film that stars Andrew Garfield, chronicling the crisis that ensued after OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman, only to reinstate him five days later. There is Musk, Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary on the world’s richest man and his metastasizing hold on global power. And there is You Can See Everything, the wild, top-secret Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary in which Elizabeth Holmes, 34 days from entering federal prison, invites a camera crew into her life. (And Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder who was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud, will get the small screen treatment in The Altruists, a miniseries hitting Netflix in November.)
The films may be in different genres, but they all showcase how these tech founders are worth examining in this exact moment due to the outsize influence they have over politics, culture, society, and the future. Their personalities are enigmatic—often they’re a weird mix of brilliant ideas and poor social skills—and their lifestyles are eccentric, making them perfect subjects for a movie. But in all four of these films, it’s their alleged intentions to control and manipulate that cast them as baddies onscreen.
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