It’s a long-held assumption that’s gradually evolved to become a worn-out trope unto itself: people working in tech are terrible.
From the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in the Alien franchise to Jesse Eisenberg’s questionable interpretation of Lex Luthor in the Batman v Superman movie, on-screen villains appear increasingly polished with a sense of Silicon Valley sheen.
With so many TV series and films populated by miscreant founders, I had to ask: What does the industry make of this? Are we overdue an “Are we the baddies?”-style reckoning?
“Do I wince when I see them on screen? Occasionally,” says Jason Druker, chief commercial officer at London-based VC firm SFC Capital. “Mostly I find myself thinking: ‘Yes, I have definitely met a diluted version of that person.’ Or sometimes I come off a panel and wonder if I strayed into the stereotype myself.”
The phenomenon has taken over popular culture.
In the 2025 film Bugonia, Emma Stone plays a cold biotech CEO who struggles to hide her frustration with the company’s new 5.30pm finish time which, it’s hinted, was necessary because employees were suffering burnout.
“Obviously, if people still have work to do, they should absolutely stay and do the work,” she tells her assistant, with a lethal painted-on smile.
In 2021’s Don’t Look Up, Mark Rylance’s tech solutionist CEO dooms everyone with an overcomplicated approach to intercept an incoming comet. Lukas Matsson, the boorish tech boss in Succession, feels like a cutout of a real European founder.
Meanwhile, the questionable practices of real-life founders has provided commissioning execs plenty of fodder in the age of streaming. Following the critical acclaim lauded on The Social Network, Eisenberg’s first attempt at portraying an egomaniacal billionaire, shows including WeCrashed, The Dropout and The Playlist pulled a similar trick with other real-life moguls.
“I’ve noticed a strong tonal shift in my own lifetime,” says Milette Gillow, cofounder of The Tech Bros, an accelerator for women founders. “Films like Bicentennial Man and A.I. in the late 90s and early 2000s had an extremely positive, almost philosophical view on whether a machine could truly develop sentience.
“Then we got films like Ex Machina and Her. AI became a seductress, trying to trick us with her superior intelligence.”
Lack of self awareness
Why do techies make compelling anti-heroes?
“Because they genuinely are bad at understanding how they come across,” says Renée Shaw, a creator at German AI company Tl;dv, who lampoons founders like Sam Altman on LinkedIn. “The industry spent 15 years saying ‘we're making the world a better place’ with a straight face. The lack of self-awareness is the joke.”
Has tech’s reputation ever been this low? “Probably not since the dotcom crash, but this feels different,” says Druker. “Back then it was about overhype and froth. Now it’s about power.”
These stories resonate because they capture the angst over how much tech is changing things. “Platforms shape elections, AI reshapes labour markets, founders speak in world-historical tones,” says Druker.
Shaw agrees. “None of these movies are saying ‘technology bad’. They're saying: ‘Unchecked power plus a God complex plus nobody saying no equals bad.’”
It’s only fair to acknowledge that tech people do occasionally get to be the heroes on screen, as in the 2013 comedy The Internship, starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, which explored the wonders of working at Google (though critics mostly called it craven promotion).
Google Maps was the improbable hero of the 2016 film Lion, the true story of a boy separated from his family who, 25 years later, uses the then-new technology to find his way back to India and his mother.
A piece of tech hasn't made me cry like that since... well, last week, when I lost my phone and two-factor authentication locked me out of every important app.
The ‘unglamorous majority’
There are plenty of tame personalities the camera never finds. For example, Lovable founder Anton Osika is known to walk around the office in his socks and talks enthusiastically about giving money to charity. We may never see his Netflix takedown.
Tech moguls are also getting more careful with their image. When did Zuckerberg last sit down for an interview with a mainstream outlet? He and his peers can speak directly via their own platforms, or hop on a pro-tech podcast where the toughest question might be "how are you killing it so much?"
Tech’s bad on-screen reputation is because of a few “extreme characters,” says Gavin Wade, a British founder who is developing a startup “in stealth”. “In my experience, 99% of tech founders are exceptionally good, generous people. They see a problem that is causing people pain and are using tech to solve it.”
Druker agrees. “The camera rarely lingers on the unglamorous majority: founders grinding away at climate tech, health diagnostics, supply chain software.
“‘Person builds moderately successful B2B SaaS company and improves procurement efficiency’ does not sell much merch,” he says. “They’re not very cinematic.”
