The Social Reckoning, starring Jeremy Strong.
ColumnStars and Swipes
Hollywood is turning its cameras on the tech elite, with three films taking aim at Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman. The results are damning.
Marion McKeone
THE TECH BROS are having a celluloid moment. But it’s not one of their making. Or their liking, for that matter.
Three cinema releases focusing on three tech oligarchs have been scheduled for release within a three-month period. Coincidence – or a reflection of the heightened public distrust of the purveyors of artificial intelligence and social media platforms? All three subjects – Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Sam Altman – are roasted by their creators, although each one is served up differently.
Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is a sequel of sorts to The Social Network, the commercial and critical Mark Zuckerberg biopic that garnered three Oscars and four Golden Globes back in 2010, including one each for Sorkin’s screenwriting.
Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’, a four-hour documentary, which lands in Irish cinemas on Friday, is a damning profile of Elon Musk. And Artificial, billed as a comedy-drama that skewers Sam Altman, the founder and chief executive of OpenAI, opens in December.
Sony Pictures Entertainment / YouTube
Despite – or more likely because – the combined worth of their various enterprises is around $8 trillion (€7.15 trillion), all three are surprisingly sensitive to criticism. It’s more surprising perhaps, given Musk and Zuckerberg’s ownership of vast swathes of social media, that the public perception of them remains so dismal.
How to lose friends
A 2022 Harvard CAPS/ Harris Poll indicated just 14% of Americans approved of Zuckerberg, making him less popular than even Vladimir Putin, whose favourability rating stood at a relatively impressive 15%. Elon Musk didn’t fare much better. In CNBC/Generation Labs poll published two months ago, 70% of 18–34-year-olds surveyed said they didn’t trust Musk, Zuckerberg and Altman.
NEON / YouTube
Time for some serious rebranding. The advance reviews of Gibney’s profile of Musk are stellar, which has prompted a furious backlash from its subject, coupled with legal threats and attempts to block its distribution.
The broligarchs at Meta, YouTube and TikTok, who claim to abhor censorship, rushed to his assistance, initially refusing to run ad campaigns or show trailers of Gibney’s documentary. Universal, the distributor, also developed a case of the wobbles when faced with the wrath of Musk.
All of which has only served to heighten interest in advance of its release. Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, by contrast, has met with mixed reviews and a sluggish response at the box office.
His complex, talky style doesn’t offer the sort of crowd-pleasing escapism that audiences, who tend to prefer supernatural to technological jump scares, crave right now. And there’s no cathartic triumph over the villain.
Despite Sorkin’s idealism, and his penchant for elevating courage and decency over power and greed, his prognosis for humanity – assuming we’re not annihilated by an AI glitch in the next decade – is bleak, if not frankly terrifying.
Musk portrays himself as a free-speech absolutist but shows little tolerance for any world view that doesn’t parrot his own, Zuckerberg is the only disruptor permitted in his tech fiefdom, which for all its open plan design and massive pay cheques comes across as an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance, secrecy and NDAs.
Underlings, no matter how brilliant, are not entitled to disagree or dispute Zuckerberg’s profit at all costs regime – much less disrupt it.
Whistleblower
In The Social Reckoning, Zuckerberg is relegated to a supporting role, confined mostly to scenes where we see him prepping for an upcoming Senate hearing in a simulated setting, with Bill Burr as Charlie, a disillusioned former investor speaking truth to power while he role-plays a hostile Senator, allowing Sorkin to indulge his penchant for rapid fire, rapier sharp dialogue.
Elevation Pictures / YouTube
The story is driven by the real-life whistleblower’s dance between Frances Haughen and the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Horowitz which serves as the vehicle for most of the dramatic tension.
It’s a wise move. In Sorkin’s world, the main character has to change and grow, and this version of Zuckerberg is already calcified by greed. Mikey Madison’s portrayal of Frances Haugen, the Facebook true believer turned whistleblower, is utterly compelling while Jeremy Allen White does a decent job as a latter-day Woodward-Bernstein composite.
His unabashed Luddite to Madison’s tech genius provides the opportunity for some classic Sorkin rapid fire exchanges, while providing a less tech savvy audience with enough of a primer to understand the consequences of Zuckerberg’s decisions.
Madison’s Haugen, a poignant, complex creature, a misfit who lives for her work but is willing to torpedo her career in pursuit of a higher principle, serves as a foil for Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Zuckerberg, which is as riveting as it’s chilling. He glides through his for-profit moral wasteland, as sinister and soulless as a shark.
Unprecedented influence
I saw Zuckerberg in Washington DC, during two days of Congressional hearings in April 2018, when he ran rings around the Senators from the Judiciary, Commerce, Science and Transport Committees, an array of would-be inquisitors entirely oblivious to their own ignorance. The few who asked vaguely relevant questions were waved off with an assurance that his people would get in touch with their people with answers.
Almost a decade later, I was struck by how Strong had uncannily absorbed the Zuckerberg I saw on Capitol Hill. Not just the physical and verbal tics, the wooden persona and the arrogance, but the banality; the utter lack of charisma. I remember thinking back then he could have been mistaken for any of the hundreds of mid-level staffers that follow mid-ranking Congressional representatives in and out of committee meetings.
In this he’s similar to Elon Musk, his more overtly peculiar and physically imposing rival. During the handful of times I’ve witnessed Musk’s performances at political events, I’ve felt vaguely mortified for him. He may be the world’s wealthiest man but watching him ‘having fun’ onstage is as excruciating as witnessing the office dweeb with a karaoke mic.
In The Social Network screenplay, Sorkin cut the Zuckerberg of his early twenties some slack. Not so for the forty-something version who he systemically eviscerates as a bloodless autocrat who takes no advice and brooks no dissent.
In Sorkin’s telling, it seems the only thing that animates Zuckerberg is his profit margins. Over and over, he’s provided with the opportunity to sacrifice relatively meagre percentages for the immeasurably greater good – reducing the risk of teenage self-harm, applying a brake to algorithms that drive Facebook users to extremist groups. Over and over, he refuses.
Sorkin repeatedly hoists Zuckerberg with his own internal research petard, using multiple scenes to hammer home the point that Facebook’s own research had revealed 64% of users who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so because the algorithm recommended them.
In Sorkin’s version of events, even as he watches the storming of the Capitol, rather than calculating the human cost of his policies of maximising profit over public safety, Zuckerberg is calculating what it might cost him. Strong’s ability to convey this calculation onscreen, without uttering a single word, is mesmerising.
Still, Sorkin’s has attracted plenty of pushback from defenders who argue that correlation is not causation, that he overstates Facebook’s role in fomenting the January 6th assault on democracy.
Where is Trump?
Another criticism lobbed at Sorkin focuses on his decision not to mention Trump by name or identify the January 6th insurrectionists as his MAGA supporters. To me, it seems like the right call. That’s a different movie and introducing Trump, no matter how fleetingly, would have distracted from what is essentially a David and Goliath morality tale where David won the battle, but Goliath won the war.
Sorkin isn’t just a gifted storyteller. He’s an idealist, a believer in the fundamental decency of most humans. Much of his finest work – including The West Wing and A Few Good Men – is based on a belief that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.
His Steve Jobs biopic was a triumph, a trifecta of top-notch writing by Sorkin, acting by Michael Fassbender and directing by Danny Boyle, with a superb support cast holding their own. The innovative three act structure and Jobs’ charisma and complexity allowed for a full beam focus on a main character who was both callous and brilliant, yet sympathetic.
Whatever about the Zuckerberg of the early 2000s, the Zuckerberg of the 2020s offers no such opportunity for nuance. Sorkin writes with the hindsight of two major events that happened after the film’s timeline ends. In January 2025, shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg, unchastened by the consequences of allowing Facebook to stream fact-free political content, dismantled Meta’s entire fact checking programme and agreed to pay Trump a $25 million (€22.36 million) settlement for suspending his Facebook and Instagram accounts after January 6th.
There is substantial evidence that Facebook and Instagram have helped turbocharge far-right manosphere content. But their impact on teenage girls and vulnerable children is equally devastating. In August this year his company agreed an historic $18 billion (€16.1 billion) settlement with 48 states – just before he was scheduled to testify in a Californian civil trial that alleged Meta had deliberately hooked children and teenagers on Facebook and Instagram.
That case was based on the testimony of whistleblower. Arturo Bejar, a former senior engineer at Meta testified that his repeated warnings to Zuckerberg about the dangers of hooking vulnerable children on his platforms, as well as the sexual harassment and grooming they were exposed to on his platforms, were ignored. Another whistleblower. Another scandal. And perhaps another Sorkin movie.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.