Hollywood Is Coming for TechZuckerberg & Elon Musk Project

Tech founders used to be Hollywood's heroes and the genius saviors building a better tomorrow. Not anymore. A wave of films and series is about to put Silicon Valley's biggest names on trial, on screen, and the founders themselves are already very nervous.

Artificial: The Sam Altman Movie He Calls "Awful"

Luca Guadagnino's Artificial stars Andrew Garfield as OpenAI founder Sam Altman, dramatizing the chaotic 2023 boardroom coup that briefly ousted him. It arrives this Christmas — and Altman has already seen the trailer.

"I did see the movie trailer," Altman told CNBC. "I mean, it looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people's creativity." When the subject of your biopic is preemptively trashing it, you know you've hit a nerve."

The Social Reckoning: Zuckerberg's Return to the Big Screen

Aaron Sorkin is finally making his very long-awaited sequel to The Social Network and this time, Mark Zuckerberg won't be played for sympathy. Jeremy Strong (Succession) takes on the Meta CEO as, in the words of early descriptions, "painfully awkward and domineering." Given what the last fifteen years have done to Facebook's reputation, Sorkin has no shortage of material.

Musk: Four Hours of Elon

Documentarian Alex Gibney the man behind takedowns of Enron and Scientology has made an exhaustive four-hour documentary about the world's richest man. If Gibney's track record is anything to go by, this won't be a puff piece.

Plus: SBF and Elizabeth Holmes

The pile-on doesn't stop there. Netflix is developing The Altruists, a series about jailed crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried, while Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim are behind a mysterious documentary on disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Why Now?

As CNN's Zoe Sottile reports, this trend reflects genuine public resentment. A recent CNN poll found a vast majority of Americans are now more concerned than excited about AI. WIRED editor-in-chief Katie Drummond puts it bluntly: people are watching elites "foist technology on them that they don't necessarily want in their lives."

My take: Hollywood smells blood. The techlash is the defining cultural mood of the moment, and studios are doing what they always do — turning anxiety into content. The question isn't whether these will be good movies. It's whether the founders can still control their own stories when the storytellers have stopped admiring them.

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