“Mountainhead” and the Age of the Pathetic Billionaire

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong’s latest work, a ripped-from-the-headlines sendup of tech billionaires called “Mountainhead,” is arguably an extension of his over-all project: making the ultra-wealthy look fallible, unglamorous, and often flat-out amoral. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the new movie draws on the tech oligarchs we’ve come to know in real life, and consider the special place that the über-rich have held in the American imagination since the days of Edith Wharton and Upton Sinclair. How has the rise of such figures as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg changed our conception? And, as they’ve become more present in our daily lives—and more cartoonishly powerful—is it even possible to satirize them? “I think now that job is more important and also harder to do for artists,” says Schwartz, “simply because the culture is so enraptured with wealth."

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Mountainhead” (2025)

“Succession” (2018-23)

“Oil!,” by Upton Sinclair

“There Will Be Blood” (2007)

“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” (1984-95)

“Three Faces of American Capitalism: Buffett, Musk, and Trump,” by John Cassidy (The New Yorker)

“Joe Rogan, Hasan Piker, and the Art of the Hang” (The New Yorker)

“On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama,” by Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey (The New York Times)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker.
0:09.0	I'm Vincent Cunningham.
0:10.0	I'm Alex Schwartz.
0:11.1	And I'm Nomi Fry.
0:12.6	Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.
0:18.1	Hey, guys.
0:19.0	Hello.
0:19.6	Hey, oh.
0:20.6	Good week. How's everyone doing? Good week to you.
0:23.3	You know, feeling, feeling wealthy in spirit. Yeah. Post, Nix. Post. That's, that's a different matter
0:31.0	entirely. Okay. I would like to sit fire on a Madison Square Garden. Let us move on. Let us move on.
0:36.5	Okay, so Americans are obsessed with the pictures of extreme wealth.
0:40.8	This is true for our culture right now.
0:42.8	I'm thinking most recently of TV shows like White Lotus and Succession and your friends and neighbors.
0:49.5	But it goes back.
0:51.7	It goes back to characters like Daddy Warbucks and Bruce Wayne, Batman. And of course, you know, late 19th century, early 20th century novelist like Edith Wharton who depicted kind of robber baron characters.
1:06.3	Yeah. I mean, as far as I can tell, Bruce Wayne is a superhero simply because he could buy his way into that. Right. Can someone explain to me what he had going for him other than early trauma and extreme wealth?
1:22.2	And you could say this doubly for like Iron Man, for example. Sure. He's just a guy with a lot of plants. Oh, I guess he's a scientist or something. He's like really brilliant. But then it's the billions that can bring the ideas into fruition. I will say a burning desire for revenge for one's, I don't know, dead parent. I mean, that is kind of a superpower. Yeah, but you got to have the money. You got to have the bucks. That's right.
1:44.4	Trauma plot plus a lot of money equals superhero is what you're telling me, vis-a-vis Batman, at least.
1:53.6	Superhero or ruinous?
1:56.0	A ruinous maniac.
1:57.6	Yes.
	...

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