Mountainhead Revisited

7 Jan 2026 •

"Should we go Argentina, Paraguay, Chile… or do we go Haiti, Cuba, Panama, Mexico?" Or maybe we just "scale this up and coup-out America."

In the HBO movie Mountainhead, which premiered on 31 May 2025, four tech bros gather at a mountain retreat to compare their net worths and catch up on their plans for world domination.

The richest, Venis, worth $220 billion, arrives on the mountain soon after rushing to market a new video generation app without any safety guardrails.

He realizes he's unleashed chaos on the world.

But he's really enjoying the memes.

As fake videos go viral and real violence spreads around the world, Randall, worth $63 billion and the mentor of the group, suggests taking over "a couple of failing nations, show people how it's done." He recommends they start with "Argentina, Venezuela or Cuba."

The plan he describes is to take over "one or more fragile or failed Western Hemisphere states" and "intellectually and financially back a rolling swap-out to crypto-network states."

Jeff, their younger tech billionaire frenemy, worth $59 billion, tries to dial back the plan. "Maybe we start in Panama, or buy St. Barts," he suggests.

"We could probably buy Haiti," observes Randall.

Estimating a price tag of "fifteen bil," Venis says, "I could eat that."

Before long, though, that plan has to be put on hold.

Nations are mobilizing for war and the President wants to talk.

After speaking with the President, Venis appears deflated. "He had some poorly informed criticisms," he says.

Within seconds, though, Venis gathers himself, abandons the idea of staging a series of coups through Latin America and the Caribbean, and announces his new plan.

It's time, he says, to "get upstream, leverage our hardware, software, data, scale this up, and coup out the U.S."

At this point, we're not even halfway through the movie.

Tellingly, the suggestion that this quartet might "coup out" America is not even the moment when some reviewers think the movie jumps the shark.

You'll have to watch the second half of Mountainhead for that.

From Fountainhead to Mountainhead

Mountainhead was written and directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong. And some of the criticisms leveled against it are that it feels rushed in comparison to Armstrong's earlier work.

But there's a reason he wanted it out so quick.

If the movie tagline is correct, "Humanity is in their hands." And that means we don't have much time.

In the seven months since Mountainhead was released, America's real-life tech billionaires have tightened their grip on the future of humanity while making their personal fortunes even more closely dependent on the state.

America's platform-owning, newsfeed-controlling broligarchs have funneled cash to our corrupt, grifter president while conspicuously reworking content policies and tweaking their algorithms to show their allegiance to a man Twitter and Facebook once banned for inciting violence.

In turn, Trump has obliged the bros at every turn, morphing into a crypto-friendly AI accelerationist whose own net worth has multiplied as the result of his new policies and scams.

Meanwhile, real events have quickly caught up to the satire of the Mountainhead plot:

An AI deepfake explosion: While AI video generation and deepfakes were already adding to the spread of mis- and disinformation before Mountainhead, the trend has accelerated dramatically — and in ways almost as reckless as was shown in the movie.
- A huge chunk of Meta's revenue is now dependent of its failure to police scams based on political impersonation which are running rampant on Facebook. With 15 billion ‘high risk’ advertisements reaching users every day, 10% of Meta's entire ad business is now generated by scams.
- OpenAI's Sora app (launched in September 2025) allows users to create deepfake videos featuring real people (including their own CEO Sam Altman and billionaire Mark Cuban) who have approved the use of their actual likenesses. Whether or not users include real people in their Sora videos, the app's watermark is easily removed, which means that videos created by Sora are deceiving (or attempting to deceive) hundreds of millions of users every day on platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
- On X, Elon Musk's Grok chatbot will churn out deepfakes of public figures on demand, something Musk and Trump both leaned into following the arrest of Maduro. In December 2025, Musk launched a new update to Grok that removed the guardrails prohibiting the sexualization of children. The update led to a "mass undressing spree" that turned X into what The Atlantic calls a "Pornography Machine." The steady stream of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) that Grok produced and published violated xAI's own policies and was likely, by Grok's own admission, illegal. It has also prompted condemnation and investigations in multiple countries.
Venezuela: In Mountainhead, the tech bros imagine Venezuela as one of the first nations they might coup and turn into a "crypto-network state." In reality, reports Gil Duran, just days after the U.S. military operation that overthrew Maduro, the Charter Cities Institute — a non-profit funded and/or promoted by Palantir co-founders Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale and Thiel Fellowship co-founder Michael Gibson — issued a public call for Trump to put a "freedom city" in Venezuela. Writes Duran: "Freedom city is Trump’s word for a network state — a new sovereign territory ruled by corporations."
Argentina: In Mountainhead, Souper, the poor friend played by Jason Schwarzman, net worth $521 million, is told he will be the new President of Argentina. ("I don't know if I want to run Argentina on my own," he pleads.) In reality, Trump Secretary Scott Bessent, whose net worth is (coincidentally) also $521 million, used $20 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to to bail out "Argentina’s version of Elon Musk" and his own hedge fund buddies. The U.S. intervention helped shore up the Argentine peso, allowing President Milei to overcome his negative polling and tighten his party's grip on power in October's midterm elections.
Rolling coups in Latin America and the Caribbean: In Mountainhead, the question is "Should we go Argentina, Paraguay, Chile… or do we go Haiti, Cuba, Panama, Mexico?" After Trump's bombing of Venezuela and Maduro's capture, reports Axios, "Trump immediately teased potential military action in Cuba, Colombia and Mexico."
Musk is continuing to "coup-out" America from within: In Mountainhead, Venis thinks he's smarter than the President and should be running the country. "What military operational capabilities does the U.S. state have absent our cooperation?" he asks. Randall (a Peter Thiel-like figure), says "If I pulled the plug, opened the back door, nothing flies, nothing moves. Uncle Sam is left with a few unpaid grunts and their pea-shooters." Venis, the guy who started the film's fictional crisis with his video generation app, then says: "We'd swarm them with their own kill drones in twenty minutes." In reality, JD Vance (a Musk-Thiel protege) has helped Musk repair his rift with Trump. Musk dined publicly with Donald and Melania at a table for three at Mar-a-Lago early in the New Year, shortly after recommitting his massive financial support to help Trump and the GOP in the 2026 midterms. In addition to his deep pockets, Musk's support also includes his active spreading of misinformation and his continued gaming of the X algorithm.

More than anything, Mountainhead exposes the extent to which Silicon Valley's one-time "libertarians" and the GOP have abandoned their recent devotion to Ayn Rand, embracing something far more menacing instead.

In Rand's The Fountainhead, the message was that great men — creators and founders — should be left alone to build, unhampered by government regulation and the constraints of the mediocre.

In Mountainhead, the "great men" no longer want to be left alone. They believe they must be in charge of everything: governments, economies, information systems, even reality itself.

Howard Roark wanted government out of his life. His message was, "leave me alone and I’ll build."

Elon Musk, whose "genius" has always been propped up by collectivist largesse, doesn't want government out of his life. He wants it under his thumb.

Like Venis in Mountainhead, Musk's message is simple: "give me control or everything collapses."

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Further reading:

Musk Madness (March 2024):