‘I have a lot of sympathy for Elon Musk': Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on his tech bros AI satire Mountainhead

The Guardian

a day ago

When he gets to his London office on the morning this piece is published, Jesse Armstrong will read it in print, or not at all. Though the building has wifi, he doesn't use it. 'If you're a procrastinator, which most writers are, it's just a killer.' Online rabbit holes swallow whole days. 'In the end, it's better to be left with the inadequacies of your thoughts.' He gives himself a mock pep talk. ''It's just you and me now, brain.''
Today, the showrunner of Succession and co-creator of Peep Show is back at home, in walking distance of his workspace. He could be any London dad: 54, salt-and-pepper beard, summer striped T-shirt. But staying offline could feel like a statement too, given Armstrong is also the writer-director of Mountainhead, a film about tech bros. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Open AI's Sam Altman, guru financiers Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen: all these and more are mixed up in the movie's characters, sharing a comic hang in a ski mansion. Outside, an AI launched by one of the group has sparked global chaos. Inside, there is snippy friction about the intra-billionaire pecking order.
Mountainhead feels like a pulled-back curtain. But Armstrong also resisted another rabbit hole: spending time in Silicon Valley for research. He tried that kind of thing before. Contrary to rumour, Succession never did involve backdoor chats with the children of Rupert Murdoch. Once the show became a phenomenon, though, he did meet with masters of finance and corporate media, picking their brains for insights at luxe New York restaurants. 'And they'd be charismatic, and namedrop the 20 most famous people in the world, and I'd feel this buzz of excitement by association. Then later I'd look at my notes, and what they'd actually said read like complete inane bullshit. 'Make the move!' 'Be the balls!''
So Armstrong returned to his office and, more generally, his kind. 'I'm a writer,' he says, 'and a writer type. And I'm happy with other writer types.' In America, when Succession exploded, you could sense an assumption the mind behind it must be an English Aaron Sorkin: a slick character as glamorous as the world he wrote about. Instead, here was the dry figure who compares making Mountainhead to an early job at budget supermarket Kwik Save. (Both, he says, boiled down to managing workload.)
Rather than stalk Sam Altman, he read biographies and hoovered up podcasts. Amid the oligarchs' tales of favourite Roman emperors, he kept finding a common thread: a wilful positivity about their own effect on the world. 'And it must be delightful to really believe, 'You know what? It's going to be fine. AI's going to cure cancer, and don't worry about burning up the planet powering the AI to do it, because we'll just fix that too.''
Part of the trick, he says, is perspective. At a certain level, money and power give life the feel of an eternal view from a private plane. 'Whereas reality is standing in the road, dodging cars, thinking 'Oh God! This is fucking terrifying!''
Success and Succession have not made Armstrong an optimist. But they did give him the professional heft to direct Mountainhead as well as write it, and to do so at unprecedented pace. Film and TV move achingly slowly; it was last November that he decided he wanted to make a movie about the junction of AI, crypto and libertarian politics. By May, he was preparing for it to come out.
He says now he wanted Mountainhead to be 'a bobsleigh run. Short, and slightly bitter, and once you're on, you're on.' His voice quickens recalling a first meeting with Steve Carell, who he wanted to play Randall, 'the group's dark money Gandalf'. This was January. Without a script, Armstrong could only tell the actor the story he'd loosely planned. Carell sat in silence. 'I thought, 'Well, this has gone very badly.'' Then he said yes. 'At which point it was like, 'Fuck. This is actually going to happen. Now I have to write it.''
By March, the film was being shot in a 21,000 sq ft mansion in Deer Valley, Utah, then on the market for $65m. Carell aside, the cast included Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman. For Armstrong, directing his first feature on a berserk turnaround was made easier by a deep fondness for actors. Standing in front of a camera, he says, paralyses him with self-consciousness. 'So I honestly find what they do magical.'
His own lack of talent as a performer proved important to the younger Armstrong. Between 1995 and 1997, he worked as an assistant to Labour MP Doug Henderson. It was an interesting time to have the job, with Tony Blair about to enter Downing Street. Is there a Sliding Doors world where a rising star assistant becomes an MP himself? One where, by now, Jesse Armstrong is home secretary?
He shakes his head for several seconds. 'I just wasn't good at the job. Fundamentally, I didn't understand politics.' He knows it sounds odd, having later written for insidery Westminster comedy The Thick of It. 'But I couldn't do the acting. I didn't get it. I always thought like a writer, so in meetings where I should have been building my career, I'd just be thinking, 'That's weird. That's funny. Why did you say that?'' (Armstrong once wrote for the Guardian about a meeting with then Conservative minister Ann Widdecombe, in which she sat under two posters: one a lurid anti-abortion message, the other Garfield.)
Instead, he segued into comedy, and soon after Peep Show, the beloved squirm of a sitcom co-written with Sam Bain. At first glance, Succession is the obvious prequel to Mountainhead, a former newspaper empire giving way to tech superpower. But Armstrong sees a closer link between his new film and Peep Show: 'Because it's about men, and male hierarchies, and the pathos of men trying to connect.'
He is tickled by the thought of his own story world, in which characters from different projects collide. 'You can see Super Hans arriving at Mountainhead on a scooter, delivering the ketamine.' Then he pauses, suddenly anxious. Could he make sure I'll mention Bain if I talk about Peep Show? 'Because it was always Sam's show as well.' And Hans owed so much to actor Matt King too, he says, 'and then, of course, there's David Mitchell and Robert Webb.'
Should Armstrong ever make an Oscar acceptance speech, we will be there a while. Making sure due credit is given is of a piece with his near-pathological modesty. (He is a keen footballer. Which position? 'Terrible.') Being fair-minded matters too. He adds a postscript to his memory of leaving Westminster. 'I'd also say I don't in any way feel superior to people who do make a career in politics. I still believe we need good, professional politicians.'
Turning back to Mountainhead, his even-handedness reaches a kind of event horizon. Armstrong , it transpires, feels sorry for Elon Musk. 'Musk has done huge damage in the world, particularly with Doge, but I have a lot of sympathy for him.' The owner of X was brutally bullied as a schoolboy and according to a 2023 biography, had a difficult relationship with his father. 'This is a traumatised human being,' says Armstrong. Still, not every bullied child ends up making apparent Nazi salutes onstage. 'Yeah. That wasn't great.'
But there are other sides to Armstrong. For all the hints of bumble and awkwardness, he has also had the discipline to build a stellar career. And the more measured he is in person, the more Mountainhead feels like the work of a grinning Id, rising up to take a scalpel to his subjects, with their pretensions to philosophy, and dark indifference to life. ('I'm so excited about these atrocities,' a character beams as the world goes violently awry.) But his sympathy has its limits. 'I do think the cocoon they're in makes it hard for them to remember other people are actually real. But they've also been quick to give up trying. And some definitely feel the superior person shouldn't have to try anyway.'
More to the point, though, Armstrong finds the tech moguls funny. Much of the grimness of a Musk or Thiel is also brilliantly ridiculous: the epic lack of self-knowledge, the thinness of skin. Having studied them as he has, would he expect his real-life models to be enraged by the film? 'Oh no. They'd instantly dismantle it in a way that would be 50% completely fair, and 50% totally facile. But they wouldn't see any truth to it.'
Still, Mountainhead is something very rare: a movie that feels as contemporary as TikTok. For Armstrong, after Succession and now this, you might think stories about the moment had become addictive. He frowns. Is a period piece next, in fact? Victorian bonnets? 'Maybe. Genuinely maybe. Because I'm not actually that drawn to ripped-from-the-headlines ideas.' The frown deepens. 'Am I not? I don't know. I'm losing faith in my own answer, because I evidently am. I mean, I'm not going to claim I don't like writing about right now. But honestly, at the same time – I'd be pleased to get out of it.'
Mountainhead is available to own digitally now