Mountainhead the latest roughly two hour long movie by Jesse Armstrong of Succession fame, is definitely worth a watch, and a movie I have been excited about, ever since I heard about it. It also hits closer to home, as it supposedly skewers tech billionaire class in this satire, and while I'm far from being a tech billionaire, I wouldn't mind becoming one and I have worked in tech my entire life. So it is worth seeing what this satire tries to say about them. At a deeper level, mountainhead seems to nail the vibe of 2025 tech culture perfectly while at a superficial level the movie's story is just crazy. In this movie, a group of 3 "friends", decide to murder their fourth friend over the span of a night, leading to 3 insane attempts to take his life, culminating in a deal which forces the fourth friend to sell his company to the group in return for sparing his life (No way this deal can survive court??). But the story aside, which mostly serves as a medium to the dialogue, the vibe that Jesse seems intent to convey is very real. The best way I can describe the mindset is through two quotes from the movie, one from Venis (Corey Michael Smith) when confronted with the fact that his AI deepfakes are causing havoc in the third world says "Who cares, Nothing's real, everything's funny and cool", the other from Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the character that the other three plotted to kill, at the end of the movie says, "Everything's good, it was funny". Widespread, all consuming nihilism seems like the zeitgist of 2025 technology industry. It's undercurrent's are seen everywhere in the movie, nowhere more prevalent than when the three start hatching a plan to kill Jeff. It starts of as a joke, a figure of speech, then becomes real because "nothing matters, f*ck it, let's do it, will at least be interesting". The entire way they try to go through with their plan, genuinely feels like a bad joke, including the final back out from one of the characters, because he just didn't want to see a human burn to death in his home. Yet, I think this movie nails the fact that such all pervasive Ironic Nihilism has a strange force, a force that enables people to "just do things". You can just go to the government, and burn down longstanding government programs with devastating side effects to broader society. Maybe the only change I would make to this mindset is it's more like, "Who cares, everything's fucked, let's just do it, at least it will be interesting"