“I’m not a bad guy,” the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) insists at the end of “The Social Network,” the 2010 film that defined the cultural response to young tech billionaires. Zuckerberg’s thoughtful lawyer (Rashida Jones), an invented character who serves largely to adjudicate Zuckerberg’s personality, assures him that she doesn’t think he’s a jerk: “You’re just trying so hard to be one.”
Twelve years later, this ambivalence toward tech titans has resolved. The new consensus is that there is indeed something wrong with these people. Consider the new Showtime limited series “Super Pumped,” which charts the rise and fall of the Uber founder Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). As Kalanick stomps across the tech scene, John Zimmer, the measured founder of rival Lyft, diagnoses Kalanick’s problem, and his superpower: “You’re not human enough.”
“Super Pumped” (based on the book by Mike Isaac, a reporter for The New York Times) arrives amid a wave of series about bad entrepreneurs — figures who exemplify the delusions of start-up hype as they lure investors to bankroll ideas that turn out to be stupid, evil or fraudulent. In Hulu’s “The Dropout,” Amanda Seyfried plays Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who dons a black turtleneck and pretends that she has developed technology that can diagnose ailments with a single drop of blood. In Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed,” Jared Leto plays Adam Neumann, the weirdly shoeless WeWork founder who hustles a $47 billion valuation for a bunch of co-working spaces that he says constitute a global consciousness-raising movement.
Even “Inventing Anna,” the Netflix series from Shonda Rhimes focusing on the SoHo grifter Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), feels sympatico. Delvey, whose real name is Anna Sorokin, floats through the millennial start-up scene with her unplaceable European accent, bumping into the pharma bro Martin Shkreli and Billy McFarland, the Fyre Festival fraudster, as she tries (but mostly fails) to convince investors that she is a German heiress launching an exclusive club she has named after herself.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/05/arts/the-dropout-super-pumped-wecrashed-moguls.html
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