Tech titans’ rise and fall a winning formula

Hollywood’s latest appraisal of the tech industry is a crop of exciting new TV offerings focussing on greed and comeuppance ripped straight from the headlines.

The Dropout charts the rise and stunning fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, played by Amanda Seyfried and Sunny Balwani, played by Naveen Andrews. Picture: Hulu

If you hear characters spouting about funding rounds and burn rates to a soundtrack of songs from the 2010s, you’re being set up for a story about a tech mogul’s rise and fall.

WeCrashed, a series following the trajectory of former WeWork chief executive Adam Neumann (played by Jared Leto) and his wife, Rebekah Neumann (Anne Hathaway), is streaming on Apple TV+. It’s the third drama about Icarus-like tech founders to debut in the space of two months. Hulu’s The Dropout (starring Amanda Seyfried as Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes) is streaming on Disney+ and Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Uber founder Travis Kalanick) is set to launch on Paramount+ this week.

It’s the latest iteration of Hollywood’s appraisal of the tech industry. The 2010 movie The Social Network formed the blueprint for start-up entrepreneurs as antiheroes in hoodies, and the HBO comedy Silicon Valley added scathing satire when it premiered in 2014.

The new shows about tech founders in trouble also stem from a booming trade in ripped-from-the-headlines dramas and documentaries. It’s a genre fed by audiences’ fascination with hustlers of all sorts. One of the most popular, the Shonda Rhimes-produced Inventing Anna, dramatises the true story of a woman who posed as an heiress and conned New York City elites. On Netflix, it’s been in the top 10 most-watched TV series for weeks.

Only one of the tech founders portrayed in the new rise-and-fall dramas has been convicted of a crime: Holmes, who is awaiting sentencing for deceiving Theranos investors. All the founders share traits as TV characters, including mammoth levels of ambition and drive that audiences are led to admire – to an extent.

Jared Leto and Kyle Marvin in WeCrashed.

“Until the greed or hubris reaches a point that we want to see a comeuppance. It’s a combination of envy and schadenfreude,” says Drew Crevello, who created WeCrashed with Lee Eisenberg. (Representatives for the Neumanns and for Holmes didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Kalanick declined to comment.)

To retool the sometimes dry world of tech into juicy television, here are some of the narrative devices that The Dropout, WeCrashed and Super Pumped all used.

FOLLOW THE FUNDING

The typical life cycle of tech start-ups makes certain narrative milestones inevitable, like funding deals with venture capitalists, high net-worth clients and bankers. The shows make these potentially dull business meetings dramatic. In a scene from the The Dropout set on Larry Ellison’s yacht, the Oracle mogul (played by Hart Bochner) pushes Holmes to “G.T.F.M.” Translation: “Get the f--king money,” a chant she screams while wearing a life preserver.
REMEMBER THOSE WHO WERE GHOSTED

On their ascent to wealth, power and fame, all the founders leave scorched relationships with friends, family members and business partners in their wake. In Super Pumped, a girlfriend of Kalanick’s boosts his confidence for pitch meetings, but gets brushed aside after Uber gets funded. “I guess I was just your seed round,” she says.

TRANSLATE TECHSPEAK INTO ENGLISH

To translate the computer code, algorithms and V.C. funding strategies into digestible dialogue, the shows count on punchy descriptions and analogies. In WeCrashed, a character pokes a hole in Neumann’s cup to unleash a stream of water representing the millions WeWork is losing daily. Super Pumped uses narration by Quentin Tarantino to break down business moves such as Uber’s introduction of a new fee under the guise of passenger safety. “Just because they hide it in the fine print of an app don’t mean it ain’t a scam,” the narrator says.

Anne Hathaway in WeCrashed.

ALL WORK, PLUS PLAY

The on-screen start-ups expect cult-like loyalty from employees, and use parties as a perk. A Las Vegas bacchanal in Super Pumped results in a bill for $US25m in fees and damages. Tequila shots and employee hook-ups are recurring motifs in WeCrashed, which also features a summer camp retreat where WeWork staffers disco with their boss. The partying in the Dropout is less debauched. After drinking too much at a staff Christmas party, Holmes makes a confession about faking a test of her blood testing machine.
SET YOUR SPOTIFY TO THE OBAMA ERA

Most of the shows’ featured songs were on the rise when their protagonists were. The Dropout has tracks by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem, though Holmes’s personal tastes are depicted as more mainstream. In a montage of pitch meetings, she psychs herself up in her car by pumping Missy Elliott’s We Run This. Super Pumped features lots of Pearl Jam, and prominent needle drops in WeCrashed date from 2007 (MGMT’s Time to Pretend) and 2013 (Katy Perry’s Roar).

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

GET INSIDE THE MOGULS’ HEADS

Longform podcasts and books were the source material for TV writers who needed to create characters whom viewers would want to study over the course of a miniseries.

“We remain completely fascinated by the person who thinks the world must change and that he can change it,” says Super Pumped co-creator Brian Koppelman, also a creator of Billions.

In one scene, Kalanick describes Uber as a higher form of life, compared with the taxi industry: “This must have been what it was like when Homo sapiens were running around together with Neanderthals.”

WeCrashed producers, who adapted their story from a Wondery podcast, hired researchers to help them better understand the personal lives of Adam and Rebekah Neumann.

In the show, the real-estate entrepreneur who styled himself as a tech wizard has a strained relationship with his father; she struggles with her failed acting career. Together, they invoke a mystical agenda for WeWork that leads Leto’s character to say things like, “Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. Period.”

Chris Kornelis contributed to this article. WeCrashed is streaming on Apple TV+, The Dropout is streaming on Disney+, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is streaming on Paramount+ from May 12.