Hollywood recasts tech tycoons as bad billionaires

The writer is chair of Rockefeller International. His latest book is ‘What Went Wrong with Capitalism’

For many years I’ve been analysing the Forbes billionaires list to identify countries where rising wealth imbalances threaten to trigger social upheaval. A key assumption was that this threat would be low where wealth flowed to “good billionaires” in innovative and productivity-boosting sectors such as tech, and high where “bad billionaires” were rising in industries like real estate and mining that are more closely associated with regulatory capture.

Hollywood is rewriting that script. Movies that trickled out after the dotcom bust of 2000 were either celebratory or partly slapstick “geek tragedies” about nerds who got greedy. Now comes a swarm of films that are closer to Greek tragedies, damning Silicon Valley billionaires for godlike ambition and monstrous indifference. The targets include Sam Altman in Artificial, Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning and Elon Musk in Musk, with more on the way.

Sampling these new releases in New York got me thinking about why this is happening and where it will lead. Hollywood tends to bash corporations after a crash, as was the case following 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008. But the AI boom is still in full flow. Americans are long on these tech billionaires — deeply invested in their stocks through their 401ks and rapidly adopting their products and services — yet increasingly hostile to them.

The anger is personal. The American public embraced the digital revolution in the dotcom era but has recently turned on tech’s biggest stars, including Zuckerberg and Musk, who have seen their popularity ratings fall deep into negative territory. Though normally left of the national mood, Hollywood appears mainstream now in recasting Big Tech chief executives as bad billionaires. And that suggests the popular backlash may intensify over time.

A theme running through these movies is that hubris has consumed Silicon Valley. Artificial director Luca Guadagnino has Altman, CEO of OpenAI, muse about how the “Pandora’s box” opened by AI will topple countries and industries, while “we shepherd people into this new world”. Musk director Alex Gibney describes his subject’s key flaw as blind conviction that his own cause is so noble, he is “willing and able and should be allowed to do anything” in its pursuit.

After long cultivating an image of political free thinking and socially liberal idealism, these billionaires are now seen as expedient monopolists in bed with the Washington establishment, making them natural screen villains. The second half of Musk dwells on the Tesla and SpaceX chief’s haphazard effort to deconstruct the so-called deep state for US President Donald Trump. In The Social Reckoning, director Aaron Sorkin has a Zuckerberg “minion” boast that Facebook is “twice as big as the biggest country on earth” and therefore “post-government”, unafraid of Congress.

The arc of character decay is striking. Musk traces its protagonist’s evolution from electric vehicle entrepreneur out to save the world to Maga megalomaniac. Sorkin wrote both The Social Reckoning and its 2010 prequel, The Social Network; his latest Zuckerberg is even colder and more heartless, with no redeeming features. The Altman of Artificial, once praised as an AI founder concerned about the ill effects of tech, now couldn’t care less, saying with a shrug: “I didn’t invent teen suicide.”

These Hollywood takedowns reflect the nation’s anti-establishment mood, capturing how completely it has engulfed the tech elite. Given AI’s potential to boost productivity and economic growth, I think it is premature to jump on this bandwagon. But shifts in popular perceptions of the rich can be warning signs of unrest — and it’s increasingly hard in today’s mood to keep tech barons on the “good” list.

The US has nearly 1,000 billionaires whose combined wealth of $8.4tn equals 27 per cent of GDP — one of the world’s highest shares. As I see it, the large share of wealth held by tycoons in “good” sectors usually helps the country’s billionaire class maintain a positive public image and avoid political attacks. But move the tech tycoons to the “bad” category, and the profile of America’s billionaire class darkens sharply. The “good” share of US billionaire wealth plunges from over 40 per cent to 2 per cent. Among developed nations, the US rank for the share of “good” billionaires slides from fourth to 16th.

America then looks less like a model of entrepreneurial wealth creation and more like a society vulnerable to a backlash against the ultra-rich. Just like in the movies.