From Zuck to Musk: Big Tech’s Scandals and Scammers Are Coming to the Big Screen

Hollywood is unleashing a handful of movies this fall, pulling the curtain back to shine a light on some of the big names in tech: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk; Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes; and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Plenty of movies have tackled themes of techno-pessimism and dug into the deep well of science fiction. Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey? Blade Runner? M3GAN? But apocalyptic threats and human-versus-machine scenarios feel much more prescient in 2026. What’s changed is that there seems to be an appetite for Big Tech to get its comeuppance. The movies being released are real stories about the scandals and scammers affecting our daily lives. The Social Reckoning (Oct. 9) The Social Reckoning continues the story Aaron Sorkin began with the 2010 film The Social Network about Facebook. The Oscar and Emmy-winning screenwriter stepped behind the camera to helm the movie, which he once again wrote. The Social Reckoning highlights the societal damage caused by Zuckerberg’s social media empire. Based on thousands of leaked documents from former Facebook engineer Frances Haugen, the movie draws inspiration from the 2021 Wall Street Journal article The Facebook Files, which documents the whistleblower’s actions and the subsequent fallout. Succession star Jeremy Strong now plays Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg played the bright-eyed college student 16 years ago). The film also stars Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr and Betty Gilpin. The Social Reckoning hits theaters Friday. Musk (Oct. 16) The upcoming documentary Musk is by lauded filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose work includes Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. Running about 4 hours, the movie delves into the life and legend of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and (cue Dr. Evil’s theme music) the richest man in the world. Given that the film seems to dismantle the mythos he built and sold along the way, Musk hasn’t had kind words to say, calling the movie a “hit piece” and Gibney a “douchebag” in a social media rant. For a brief period, ads for the movie were barred from social media platforms Meta, YouTube, TikTok and X. Google and Meta have since cleared the way for promotional materials for Musk, while the other platforms have remained silent. Musk hits theaters on Oct. 16 and will stream on HBO Max next year. You Can See Everything (Oct. 16) In case you’re unfamiliar with the story of Holmes, Gibney’s 2019 movie is a good place to start. You could also try the 2022 Hulu original series The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried. Holmes, who was the face of Theranos, a short-lived blood-testing company, was indicted in June 2018 for fraud and conspiracy. You Can See Everything is a nearly 3-hour-long documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (the director of the Chris Hanson drama Primetime), which appears more like a psychological horror film than a nonfiction narrative. The new movie follows Fielder into the private life of Holmes and her family, roughly a month before she was to report to prison. You Can See Everything has a hefty amount of buzz behind it and is turning into one of fall’s must-see theatrical releases. You Can See Everything is released Oct. 16. Artificial (Dec. 25) Italian film director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name and Queer) turns his eye on OpenAI’s Altman in his upcoming biopic, Artificial. Just like The Social Reckoning, this isn’t a documentary, and it’s already generating substantial Oscar buzz. Artificial takes place in 2023 and follows the tumultuous period when Altman was fired by OpenAI and then rehired five days later. Amazon MGM Studios was originally set to distribute the movie, but after signing a multiyear partnership with OpenAI, it stepped away from the project. Neon came in and picked up the film, which also stars Billie Lourd, Monica Barbaro, Chris O’Dowd, Jason Schwartzman, Zozia Mamet and Ike Barinholtz (who plays Musk). Artificial will premiere in theaters on Christmas Day. What to stream If you’re watching from home, you can also cash in on the Big Tech dystopia genre. AMC’s The Audacity is a fictional account of the Silicon Valley tech bubble. Netflix has the documentary The AI Doc or How I Became an Apocaloptimist and will soon release AI Gone Wild, a new Instadoc about the rather infamous Hugging Face cyberattack. The streamer will also debut The Altruists, an eight-episode true-crime series about the 2022 collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, FTX, on Nov. 19. There’s even a legal procedural called Cupertino coming to CBS this week that is about Silicon Valley lawyers.