Hollywood’s Tech-Founder Fixation Takes a Dark Turn
The temptation, when considering the tech founder, is to confuse his oddity for genius. Hunched shoulders and a bad haircut, pale skin accustomed to blue light rather than sunlight, a pinched smile that expresses neither joy nor sorrow. In the popular imagination, he is the prep-school nerd who never got the girl, the dweeb who always got picked last on the playground. In his office—whether it’s a dorm room, a garage, or a C-suite—he is Mr. Burns, snivelling and steepling his fingers; he is alone on a Friday night, bathing in the glow of his laptop. When he finally invents some civilization-altering product, one that will garner him billions of dollars, he makes a point to maintain a modest wardrobe of zip-up hoodies and T-shirts; caring about clothes is, of course, a waste of his time and brain space. He’s got the charisma of a door and the arrogance of a child, which he might still very well be. He thinks everyone has it out for him, and they probably do.
The Silicon Valley giant has become one of the most widely mythologized figures in American life, a fixture of magazine covers and televised interviews, and, increasingly, of the big screen. His iconography draws on the complicated lineage of the robber baron, the gold miner, the oilman, the industrialist, and the inventor: forward-thinking disrupters unafraid to step on necks or, in the words of the Meta C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, to “move fast and break things.” When film and television try to capture the messy morality of these would-be titans, the results are predictably ambivalent. Are these men—and they’re almost always men, white men—the villains of our time, or are they troubled, misunderstood heroes?
Unlike the 2013 bio-pic “Jobs,” which was openly worshipful of its subject (“an extended Apple ad,” the film critic Peter Keough wrote), “Steve Jobs,” from 2015, portrayed the Apple C.E.O. as both a monster and a visionary, a cold and distant perfectionist whose flaws are inseparable from his greatness. In the film, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin, Jobs (Michael Fassbender) is still the indisputable hero, a creator of miraculous products that can be only so marred by his personal blemishes. This is the guy who brought us the iPhone, after all.
“The Social Network,” from 2010, also written by Sorkin, and directed by David Fincher, was somewhat less forgiving of its subject, Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Played by Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerberg is dramatized as a conceited, socially awkward college student who repeatedly burns allies in pursuit of power. His casual brilliance, however, complicates his misbehavior: in a hoodie and flip-flops, he creates a revolutionary social-networking platform, and his unwavering confidence allows him to steamroll everyone who attempts to slow him down. Sorkin supplies him with an endless set of quips (“If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook”), and the result is that Zuckerberg is callous, but never uninteresting. One pities his co-founder, Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield), who gets shafted during the course of the story, but when Zuckerberg is up against the privileged, seemingly six-foot-twenty Winklevoss twins, one can’t help but root for the laser-tongued geek in a sweatshirt.
The characterization was unflattering enough that the real Zuckerberg later said that he found aspects of the film “kind of hurtful,” but the movie itself—which would go on to win three Oscars—was, ultimately, an anointment. Like “Steve Jobs,” it mostly limited its critiques to the founder’s private indiscretions, rarely taking issue with the thing he was actually building, which was presented as unequivocally cool. After Jim Ying, a mobile-game executive, saw “The Social Network,” he suggested to NPR that it might mobilize young people into the tech industry. “It was supposed to be a discouragement,” he said, “but I will be curious to see if, despite Zuckerberg’s dark side, it inspires people to join startups.” Indeed, just as some viewers metabolized Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” credo in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, “Wall Street,” as a motto to live by, or mistook Jordan Belfort’s reckless indulgence in the 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street” for aspirational behavior, a certain demographic of person watched “The Social Network” and thought, Yes, this. In 2011, the Times reported that the movie had inspired more young people to pursue computer science: “It’s become very glamorous to become the next Mark Zuckerberg,” one Yale student said. In 2024, Jessica Livingston, a co-founder of the venture-capital firm Y Combinator, noted that the film had “legitimized the idea of doing a startup.” Sorkin’s Zuckerberg might have been detestable—not an asshole, as a lawyer played by Rashida Jones clarifies in the film’s humanizing final line, but a guy who was “trying so hard to be”—and, still, the movie elevated its protagonist into a figure worthy of idolization.
Sixteen years out from “The Social Network,” our relationship with social media, and with technology more generally, is both much more intimate and more fraught than ever before. Our news feeds have gone from happy-birthday posts and vacation photos to outrage bait and A.I. slop, and tech founders have transformed from boy geniuses in hoodies to suited billionaires in courtrooms and in doomsday bunkers. The films about them have in turn evolved from coming-of-age stories and stylish bio-pics into whistle-blower dramas and dark thrillers. This past weekend, “The Social Reckoning,” Sorkin’s indictment of the behemoth that Zuckerberg created, premièred in theatres. The world of the film is dark and damaged, not Facebook blue but rather a series of navies, grays, and clinical neutral tones. Well-meaning Facebook users are getting sucked into radicalized political networks, children on Instagram (another Zuckerberg-owned platform) are being mercilessly bullied, and millions of hapless social-media users are spending untold hours in front of their screens, depressed and furious without exactly knowing why.
Zuckerberg, this time played by Jeremy Strong, is unmistakably the villain here. He is a cruel and amoral authoritarian, who reconfigures Facebook’s algorithm to maximize engagement, despite the growing evidence that this rewards outrage, and he lashes out at anyone in his inner circle who questions his judgment. He also belittles any evocations of fairness and integrity; in one scene, he rejects a content-moderation plan because it may affect engagement by a single percentage point. The film almost feels like an apology for any residual cultural damage that “The Social Network” might have perpetuated. As such, Sorkin architects a revenge plot against Zuckerberg, who he suggests facilitated the rise of right-wing politics and widespread conspiracism on a platform that once promised friendship and connection—corporate clichés that are tirelessly repeated throughout the script.
“The Social Reckoning,” perhaps to its detriment as a piece of entertainment, is morally clear-eyed, and it’s noteworthy that, in order to unambiguously depict Zuckerberg as a force for bad—arguably a force for all that is bad—the film could not be a tech movie. Instead, it’s a journalism movie. The protagonists are the Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and his main source, Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook employee who reluctantly becomes a whistle-blower after the company doesn’t heed her online-safety concerns. Sorkin mythologizes them (“she’s disrupting,” Horwitz says, of Haugen, to a Facebook executive), and, by focussing on their noble mission to expose Zuckerberg, he limits the tech billionaire’s screen time, giving viewers fewer opportunities to identify with the founder or to agree with him. That’s not to say that people haven’t been able to find a way: after the film’s X account posted a clip of Strong-as-Zuckerberg refusing to fact-check political ads, several online commentators described the depiction as “based,” with Zuckerberg coming off as a “total gigachad.” Adam Singer, a blogger and the vice-president of marketing at AdQuick, wrote on X, “Rehabilitation of Zuck’s image continues unabated, they’re making him look incredibly great to push back against a state censorship apparatus here.” Oops.
“Artificial,” Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film about OpenAI, out in theatres this December, will have the distinction of being the first blockbuster picture to meaningfully tackle our current A.I. crisis. In the movie, which critics have already deemed the true spiritual successor to “The Social Network,” because of the founder story at its core, Andrew Garfield is back, trading in his previous role as a betrayed co-founder to play the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman, the movie’s manipulative betrayer. Although the casting of Garfield—an eminently likable Hollywood star, and, yes, sex symbol—threatens to lend credence to Altman’s real-life celebrity, the film’s structure resists a sympathetic portrayal by making Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, played by Yura Borisov, the emotional center of the story. (Altman isn’t a minor character like Zuckerberg is in “The Social Reckoning,” but it’s telling that Neon, the distributor of “Artificial,” is campaigning Garfield for Best Supporting Actor and Borisov for Best Lead Actor.)
Earlier this summer, Amazon MGM Studios, which had originally developed and financed “Artificial,” dropped the film and refused to release it, shortly after Amazon announced a significant partnership with OpenAI. “We believe that ‘Artificial’ will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home,” an Amazon spokesperson said, at the time. (Neon subsequently picked up the film.) The film now arrives to the public with the intoxicating veneer of a banned text, giving it more potential power as a takedown. Yet this controversy also serves as a reminder of the strangeness of our current moment, in which any attempt by Hollywood to present a genuinely damning portrait of a tech founder is potentially vulnerable to the whims of whichever tech company might be involved in the making or distribution of said project. Amazon has a production company and streaming service, as does Apple; will Jeff Bezos one day receive the Altman or the Zuckerberg treatment? What about Tim Cook?
And do we even want those movies? What exactly would they accomplish? If almost two decades of Silicon Valley bio-pics have taught us anything, it’s that narrative films can be a shaky way to critique or express dissent against those in power. Some stories are better as documentary films (see: Alex Gibney’s recent four-hour-long “Musk” documentary). What’s perhaps most interesting is why we remain so eager to make and see content about our tech overlords: often, the people responsible for our content, or for the vehicles through which we access our content.
The motives and genres are changing, but the tech-founder movies and TV shows continue apace. Later this November, a miniseries about former crypto executives Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison is set to air on Netflix. It’s being marketed as a meet-cute rom-com that blooms into, according to promotional materials, a story about “Gen Z’s Bonnie and Clyde.” This weekend, Nathan Fielder’s documentary “You Can See Everything,” which follows Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she goes to prison, arrives in theatres. Tech entrepreneurs are usefully malleable—operating as villains, victims, or witless criminals, in stories that can take pretty much any narrative form—and the result is that, in 2026, they have become what gangsters were in the nineteen-thirties, what cowboys were in the nineteen-fifties, and what superheroes were seemingly yesterday: a way for us to tell stories about power and ambition, and about good and evil, briefly offering audiences an escape that, in this case, is really just a reflection of the world outside. ♦