There is no escaping tech tycoon villains (at the movies)

• By John Bowker / Bloomberg

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There is a striking moment near the end of Musk, a new documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, when the world’s richest man is asked why he considers it important to develop X into what he calls a global platform for collective consciousness.

“I guess ...” Elon Musk replies to his questioner, the billionaire Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath, before his voice trails off. There is a pause of several seconds in which neither man says anything. Eventually, after a couple of false starts, Musk settles on: “To increase our understanding of the universe.”

The exchange — originally broadcast as part of Kamath’s People by WTF podcast in November last year — stands out because it follows more than three and a half hours of a film in which Musk is rarely short of words or solutions. We see his early successes during the dot-com boom, followed by his stewardship of Tesla Inc and SpaceX, the acquisition of Twitter and, ultimately, his alliance with US President Donald Trump.

Actor Andrew Garfield poses on the red carpet at the International premiere of the film “Artificial” during the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 11.

Photo: AFP

At every step, Gibney depicts Musk as relentlessly accumulating money and power, shrugging off a string of controversies — business and personal — along the way. The section on the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration initiative ostensibly created to identify and cut waste, is especially troubling to watch, particularly when it focuses on cuts to the US Agency for International Development and their impact on projects in Africa. However, when asked to articulate his deeper purpose, the tycoon is lost for words.

Musk represents a prominent example of a shift in contemporary cinema: While multibillionaire tech tycoons have made for convenient villains in the past, recent portrayals are more frequent and less ambivalent. Gibney, 72 — a prolific filmmaker who won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary feature for Taxi to the Dark Side about abuse by US soldiers — paints a picture of ruthlessness, cynicism and a chronic lack of regulatory oversight. Musk is designed to leave the viewer feeling bleak about the world. As Gibney asks by way of a mission statement: “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?”

That question, to which there is no straightforward answer, speaks to a growing sense of public discomfort with the way superrich tech leaders and their companies have come to dominate the corporate, political and media landscape — as well as our personal lives. The release of Musk came just months after its subject became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s record-breaking initial public offering, an unheard-of level of wealth that is helping to fund Republican campaigns ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. According to a Pew survey conducted last year, more than half of Americans have an unfavorable view of Musk, while two-thirds had a negative perception of Meta Platforms Inc chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg.

Another version of Elon Musk appears in Artificial which screened at this month’s London Film Festival ahead of its release this winter. The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, charts the early years of OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015. Musk left the company in 2018 and has tried unsuccessfully to sue its present incarnation, allowing writer Simon Rich to make the film version played by Ike Barinholtz a form of comic relief — all facial tics and self-importance — rather than anything more sinister.

The role of tech tycoon villain instead goes to Andrew Garfield, who plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The film portrays him as the ultra-ambitious and unscrupulous driving force behind the company that gave us ChatGPT, with the movie’s conscience represented by co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever (played by Yura Borisov — best known as the kind-hearted henchman in Anora).

Artificial goes on to tell the story of Altman and Sutskever’s eventual falling-out, with Altman fired and swiftly reinstated with the support of Microsoft Corp, OpenAI’s main investor. Garfield plays Altman as increasingly cold and manipulative, swatting aside any concerns about AI safety and the people who get in his way. “I didn’t invent teen suicide!” he yells at one fellow executive, when warned of ChatGPT’s darker potential.

Facebook founder Zuckerberg was the subject of David Fincher’s acclaimed 2010 movie The Social Network and it feels apt that writer Aaron Sorkin should return with a de facto sequel some 16 years later.

In the original movie, the action revolves around a litigation against Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early years. In this fall’s The Social Reckoning he is now well-established — and it is Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) who are out to get him.

The story shows how the duo worked together on Horwitz’s award-winning reporting on Facebook and its algorithm in 2021, with a particular focus on how users can become radicalized and pushed toward extremist groups.

The rather unsubtle point of The Social Reckoning is that Facebook and Zuckerberg are terrible, while journalists and whistleblowers are good. It was not as binary when Sorkin was writing The Social Network, where the Facebook founder could be seen as a misfit simply trying to get his own back on the alpha males and women he believed looked down on him.

Some might see Facebook as a product of the past, with the stakes around the technology developed by OpenAI and rival Anthropic PBC much higher. The drunk woman who delivers a racist diatribe at police officers at the start of The Social Reckoning — radicalized by Facebook, Haugen deduces — might seem trivial compared with the potential for AI to overpower humanity, as is threatened in Artificial.

The power of technology to turn people against each other, only for us all to be overpowered by robots, drives the fear coursing through all these films. “We’ll have to build a bunker,” Geoffrey Hinton (Mark Rylance), Sutskever’s early mentor, warns him early in Artificial. “And hide from the Terminator.”