I’ve spent time with tech oligarchs – you have no idea just how weird they are

Last week, Jesse Armstrong, the British director behind Succession, released his first feature-length film – a thinly veiled satire about the tech oligarchs who dominate our lives and, increasingly, have a say over what constitutes free speech.

Though it would be easy to write off Mountainhead as pure fiction, to anyone who has spent time around these people, as I have, it was eerily accurate.

Elon Musk is inescapable in tech.Credit: AP

The four fictional billionaires are flush with obscene wealth accumulated in the technological miracle of the past two decades. Having flown in on their respective private jets, they decamp to a remote mansion for a weekend of poker and bounce between “friendly” shit talking, writing their net worth on their chests, planning a coup, and watching mass violence unfold around the world thanks to one of the character’s apps (likely a nod to Facebook’s amplification of content that ultimately contributed to genocide in Myanmar).

In writing the script, Armstrong borrowed from real life, using Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Sam Bankman-Fried as inspiration. Some of the most important and influential people of Silicon Valley, these men all share a belief in the saving grace of their own genius, even as one of them serves a 25-year sentence for duping people out of billions.

Though the world mostly thinks of Silicon Valley as some kind of liberal bastion, at its core, it is libertarian (even the film’s title is a nod to “the godmother of American libertarianism”, Ayn Rand). When I lived in San Francisco, where I was working for the Biden-Harris administration and the Democratic National Committee, I quickly realised that the prevailing attitude is that governments and regulations are pesky and burdensome – that they only serve to obstruct technological progress they’re too small-minded to understand.

Working among and moving in the same social circles as senior tech executives and some of today’s best known billionaires, you’d see just how weird they were. They would brag about sleeping in the office or demanding staff miss important family events. I once watched the son of a tech billionaire demand that a senior US government official record a video to ask a girl out for him.

In 2022, when autonomous-driving taxis started appearing on the streets of San Francisco, this confrontation between big-tech cockiness and government process showed up loud and clear. The businesses making the taxis failed to notify local officials before rolling out the vehicles, and only partially released their data to regulators.

When one tech company’s fleet was taken off the roads due to safety concerns, other tech companies lobbied to get rid of human taxi drivers entirely. Sure, there’s a lot less awkward chat in driverless taxis, but for technology with such a profound impact as vehicles driving around a city with no human behind the wheel, transparent oversight should be non-negotiable.

In 2025, we saw Elon Musk chainsawing his way through US government agencies and using government power to pick winners and losers in the tech industry, while Peter Thiel’s tech company, Palantir, has been tasked with building a database that can track everyone in the US using personal government data including health records, bank account numbers, student debt and disability status. Under President Donald Trump, this could feasibly become a dragnet to monitor political opponents and migrants. It’s the kind of data surveillance that would make George Orwell roll in his grave.

The problem with what we’re seeing in real life (and what was mirrored so accurately in Mountainhead) is what happens when these disconnected billionaires view social upheaval as an opportunity for market disruption, treating the consequences of war as inconveniences applicable only to those less fortunate.

This is the point we often miss. Like the rocket ships Musk and Jeff Bezos are shovelling money into to start clean on another planet, the tech being prioritised and pushed by the tech right isn’t designed to save us – it’s meant to save them.

Because beneath the bravado of these men is a palpable fear of mortality. In their minds, death should be reserved only for the poor. This fear drives their relentless pursuit of power and immortality. In Mountainhead, it’s Steve Carell’s character chastising a specialist for not having the cure for his terminal cancer. In real life, it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s martial arts obsession, Jack Dorsey only eating one meal per day on weekdays, and fasting all weekend to enhance his “mental clarity”, and Steve Jobs’ “fruitarian” diet of raw fruit, nuts and seeds only.

It’s a stark reminder that these Silicon Valley titans see themselves as modern-day gods wielding code and capital to reshape reality itself. Worse, it reminds us that no matter how much we think about them or how profoundly our lives are shaped by their innovations – positively and negatively – they only see us as numbers in the bank.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served in the Biden-Harris administration.

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