Ethics on Film: Discussion of "Mountainhead"

Even though Succession creator Jesse Armstrong wrote the script for Mountainhead in January of this year and filmed it in March, it oddly already feels dated. First airing on HBO on May 31, 2025, the film presents a world that has become a playground for some of the most morally reprehensible and richest people who ever existed, which means that, at times, it feels like a documentary from the early days of Trump 2.0. But, today in July 2025, wars have been fought, bills have been passed, the Marines have been deployed to Los Angeles—we’re arguably already in some kind of aftermath.

Still, when it was released, Mountainhead quickly became the most-watched HBO film in the last five years. As the tech titan at the center of the film may say, “Nothing means anything.” There is also always some value in trying to understand the ways that the most powerful people think and operate, and Armstrong certainly has an innate understanding of the world they exist in.

Synopsis

The film centers on the first (and what turns out to be the only) night of a regular gathering of four wealthy and powerful tech executives at a snowy Utah retreat named Mountainhead, in an on-the-nose allusion to Ayn Rand. The mansion is owned by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), or “Soups,” a play on “Soup Kitchen;” with a net worth of only around $500 million, he’s the only one in the friend group who’s not a billionaire. While the four “Brewsters,” as they call themselves, eat, drink, and “razz” each other, the world is quickly falling apart due to the social media platform Traam, owned by Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the richest man in the room and on the planet—with more than a few similarities to the world’s actual richest person. These updates, rolled out in casually irreverent fashion right before the gathering, allow the site’s 4 billion users to make AI videos virtually indistinguishable from reality. This leads to something resembling civil war over ethnic-based grievances in, respectively, India and Armenia, shootings in the Midwest U.S. over minor disagreements, the assassination of the mayor of Paris—eventually nearly every nation and region is affected.

Apparently, this can all be curtailed if another, slightly less sociopathic Brewster—Jeff (Ramy Youssef), possibly based on Sam Altman and/or Sam Bankman-Fried—sells Venis his miraculous AI system, Bilter, which can identify deepfakes (“the cure to digital cancer”). Of course, as the night turns downright apocalyptic, Jeff knows he has the leverage and refuses to sell. Egging this all on is Randall (Steve Carrell), the “papa bear” or wise old sage of the crew, with similarities to Peter Thiel. As the night goes on and he sees Jeff overtake him in terms of net worth and is then excluded from a phone call with the president, Randall goes into overdrive, talking of “creative destruction” and fomenting coups and power outages throughout the planet.

While violence intensifies and the discussion in the house becomes more manic (there are references to MDMA and psychedelic mushrooms), it’s hard to separate reality from AI-induced nightmare. But once Randall sets up Soups on a video call with some Argentine power-broker to discuss a coup, it’s clear that this plan is more than just talk. From there, the night continues to get darker and darker and the action and conversations in the house become increasingly unhinged from reality.

Ethical Realism or Farce

Armstrong doesn’t go into the specifics of Traam and Bilter, but the viewer can imagine that they are a few steps above the capabilities of current AI systems. To further ground the film in the tech debates of 2025, the Brewsters throw around the terms “artificial general intelligence” and “trans-human” and talk of uploading their consciousness to a grid. Their sense is that these capabilities could be available in five years, but only if they are in charge. No thought is given as to how to use this revolutionary new tech responsibly or if people even want it. It’s progress for the sake of progress and bragging rights about who got there first. Realistically the benefits will only ever be available to a select rich and privileged few.

A good portion of Mountainhead centers on the Brewsters trying to philosophize to each other on these points and to try to spin that the destruction they have helped to unleash throughout the world is actually one of the best things to ever happen to humanity. These justifications range from nihilism, with Venis outright questioning if other people actually exist, to suspect allusions to Hegel, Kant, and Plato by Randall, whose philosophy on life boils down to: “Everything is always cool so long as you get there.” Jeff is the only one to somewhat push back against this ridiculousness, but even he admits that he’s making his billions from the suffering that Venis, Randall, and others have enabled.

It's abundantly clear, though, that the primary motivation for all the Brewsters is power and self-preservation. Venis could theoretically turn off Traam and end the sharing of the AI videos, but he’d lose billions; Jeff could sell his AI to Venis and stop the plague of deepfakes, but would lose control over his company; Randall gets visibly annoyed when his supposed mentee makes a few billion dollars more than him and looks for increasingly desperate measures to gain back control; and Soups’ only real motivations throughout the evening are finding a way to make his first billion and to not be humiliated. It’s an easily accessible version of the debate about “long-termism”: The goal is “eternal comfort for trillions,” but pay no attention to the lavish lifestyles of the tech executives in Utah (or the Bahamas), the “collateral damage” of people dying from unethical decision-making, and the siphoning of resources away from people and situations that need them—not even mentioned is the amount of computing power that Traam and Bilter require.

The Limits of Tech

Another quote that Venis throws around as the world erupts in horrific violence is “You can’t halt a slave revolt halfway.” In his mind, the billions of people that are not him or in the room with him at that moment (and who may or not may not exist) are the slaves. They will all kill each other before they ever get to the billionaires in their mountain hideaway. That is a wildly simplistic take on how revolutions play out. Venis simply forgets that he and the other Brewsters are all human.

It would be easy to end this film with pitchfork-wielding mobs storming Mountainhead and bringing the Brewsters to justice (spoiler alert—this doesn’t happen), but several scenes make it clear that this is indeed somewhere in their minds. At one point over the course of the night, water stops coming from the sink tap in the house. Soups expresses actual concern as he ushers the group into his lavish “bunker” and urges Venis to stop wasting food. Deep down, the “most human” of the Brewsters instantly knows they depend on others for everything; Randall can’t even boil an egg. But their power, money, and fame have completely warped their understanding of how their privilege and status should inform their sense of ethical responsibility.

In a way, violence finally does come to the house and they all show how utterly unprepared they are to survive without their modern tools. The artificial world they created is irrelevant in these moments. Faced with adversity, they panic and make harmful and absurd choices. Fortunately for them, they have the wherewithal to withstand this episode. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it’s easy to see how similar scenarios are currently playing out in the White House and other centers of power and most people can’t retreat to their palatial mountain houses.

Discussion Questions

1. Is any amount of suffering in the present acceptable if it means a brighter future for humanity?
2. How can something like AI deepfake videos be monitored and regulated across borders? Is this possible?
3. Should humans keep striving for technological progress, even when the end results could be detrimental for humanity and the planet?
4. Is there value in understanding the mindsets of the people creating emerging technology, like AI? Are there ethical issues in making a film, like Mountainhead, about these people?
5. What should be the role of governments in regulating emerging technology? What can private citizens do?
6. Is being a billionaire inherently unethical? Why or why not?

Works Cited

"Long-termism: An Ethical Trojan Horse," Anja Kaspersen & Wendell Wallach, Carnegie Council, September 29, 2022

"The New Movie From the Creator of Succession Is Less a Satire Than a Documentary," Sam Adams, Slate, May 31, 2025

"‘Mountainhead’ Review: HBO’s Chilling Billionaires’ Summit," John Anderson, The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2025

"Tech-bro satire Mountainhead is an insufferable disappointment," Adrian Horton, The Guardian, June 2, 2025

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is an independent and nonpartisan nonprofit. The views expressed within this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Carnegie Council.