The internet was abuzz this week with praise for Jeremy Strong’s embodiment of Mark Zuckerberg in upcoming film ‘The Social Reckoning’ — an actual social reckoning, then, on the very same internet that Mark Zuckerberg happens to own a large part of. So that’s a meta moment for Meta, if you’re keeping up — just part of that increasingly eerie feeling that history is taking place in feverish real-time, not at the usual remove of a few chilly decades. Most people are in their eighties or their coffin by the time a biopic is made about them. Zuckerberg has had two before the age of 42, which either means he’s a really great guy (see also: Jesus, in smash hit ‘The Bible’), but also might end up meaning the opposite — though we should reserve judgement until we’ve seen the third film in the trilogy, ‘The Social Fallout’, in which Timothee Chalamet plays a tech founder hilariously attempting to navigate a nuclear wasteland wearing an AI headset.
For now, though, we have the magnificent Strong, best known as the coke-y Loro Piana eeyore Kendall Roy in Succession. Matt Belloni of Puck posted on X the other day that “Jeremy Strong’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning might be the thing that actually breaks the internet” — which would be quite a useful twist ending, actually, because the internet is turning out to be a really ghastly place, though I can’t quite work out who’s fault that is. Anyway, it got me thinking about the other truly memorable tech founder depictions on our screens. Do please like and share!
Seyfried nailed the deep voice and dead-eyed stare of Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in ‘The Dropout’ (AKA: ‘There Won’t Be Blood’), pointing out afterwards that Holmes’ bizarre, highly calculated persona was a central part of her massive success. “What people really loved about it was that it was unnerving. And she succeeded for a long time with these characteristics” — like the bizarre cadence of her voice, and her insistence (robbed wholesale from Steve Jobs) on wearing exclusively black turtlenecks. (The one in the show was from Gap, apparently). Turns out you needed a little more than just unnerving quirks to cure all illness from a single drop of blood, however — and thankfully our society has now reverted to putting its eggs into entirely well-adjusted and down-to-earth baskets instead (see: Elon Musk; Sam Altman).
A fascinating character-study into a narcissistic, gently creepy, dubiously motivated figure with a massively inflated sense of his own talents and charm. And the bits about Adam Neumann were pretty good, too.
Why is it that you’re not able to open up the back of an iPhone, like you can a good old 3310? Perhaps it’s so you can’t see that the stuff inside is all pretty regular. Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Steve Jobs’ (the film) effectively smashed open the back of Steve Jobs (the man) while somehow not diminishing Steve Jobs (the myth). The movie frames its action in the moments off-stage (quite literally) as Jobs prepares for three crucial Apple presentations in 1984, 1988 and 1997. Fassbender is brilliant at inhabiting the talismanic founder, reframing his reputation from messiah to, well, very naughty boy. But his performance also captures the strange, enduring allure of Jobs, for all these flaws — someone who, unlike the many founders that later molded themselves in his image, at least did think differently.
At the height of Blackberry’s success in 2007, the company’s phones made up 45% of the mobile market. Today that number sits at 0%, of course, and there is no better guide to that rapid rise and fall than 2023’s ‘BlackBerry,’ in which Baruchel plays Laziridis with that nauseous mixture of nuttiness, genius, blind faith, and sheer chutzpah that you begin to realise unites so many tech-world icaruses. But mainly it just makes you think: wow, I’d really like a BlackBerry.
Still the gold standard of tech founder depictions. Aaron Sorkin’s crackling screenplay. Eisenberg’s machine-gun delivery. Those solemn, lilting synth-keys in Trent Reznor’s score. But the finest moment in Zuckerberg’s origin story (which feels almost sweetly nostalgic now — I like to watch it on long-haul flights) comes in that bar scene, right at the beginning, in a sign-off delivered by Rooney Mara. It so brilliantly sets up everything that follows in the film — and in our current moment, too.
“You are probably going to be a very successful computer person,” she says. “But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.”
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Issue 11
In London, they used to say you were no more than five feet away from a rat. Nowadays they say you're no more than five feet away from a members club. I hope the rats have blazers.
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