From Andrew's Altman to Jeremy's Zuck: Every 2026 Tech Performance in Movies and TV, Ranked
Tech founders and CEOs have been popping up sporadically in movies and shows ever since Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 classic The Social Network.
We got Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs in 2015, Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout in 2022, and Jared Leto as Adam Neumann in WeCrashed that same year, but in relative terms, the second half of 2026 provides a glut of Silicon Valley representation.
In movies, we’ve already seen the release of The Social Network's spiritual sequel, The Social Reckoning, and UK cinemas will soon be treated to Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a terrifying and stylish account of the founding of OpenAI. On the small screen, November will see the release of the FTX miniseries The Altruists (at which time we will update this list accordingly), while in non-dramatised land, both Alex Gibney’s four-hour epic Musk and Nathan Fielder’s hotly-anticipated documentary, You Can See Everything, are currently offering viewers different ways to think about tech world hucksters and documentary movies in general.
With all those varying portrayals to choose from, it felt only right that we should tally up the performers behind them, to the best of our abilities, into a neat and tidy ranking. Read on for more on these films and these remarkable performances — and check back in for the release of The Altruists and Fielder's hyped-up doc.
Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Holmes as Elizabeth Holmes
As I don’t want to spoil a millisecond of You Can See Everything for myself, I’m just going to put this here as a placeholder, and to acknowledge what I sense might be more of a hybrid experiment from Nathan Fielder than a standard bio-doc. If, as tends to be the case with his work, the movie's subject (disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes) ends up playing along with his usual shenanigans, recreating an event from her life (or some future event à la The Rehearsal) then she will essentially be playing herself, perhaps as a comment on her own history of performance — but we're getting way ahead of ourselves.
If that's the case, Holmes will deserve an honourable mention, if not more, and we might rejig things once the movie is finally released in UK cinemas this November.
4. Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg
Like Mikey Madison’s performance as whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White’s as the investigative reporter Jeff Horowitz, Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning is a technically brilliant turn that is unfortunately trapped inside an uninspiring movie.
Topped with a haircut that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the upper tiers of the Colosseum in Gladiator II, the Succession star gives us a take on the Facebook founder that is both eerily robotic and robotically eerie. Sadly, the movie only lets us see him outside of the congressional briefing room on a couple of occasions; one of which is, unsurprisingly, also the best scene in the movie: a trip to a glass-walled office as beating drums play on in the background, like something out of Dune — although, to butcher a quote from Walter Sobchak: "Say what you want about the Harkonnen way of life, at least it’s an ethos."
3. Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman
Barring a backlash (trust me, this is bound to happen at some point) for playing an openly gay man as a kind of megalomaniacal supervillain (though if you read Altman's lengthy New Yorker profile, nothing here should surprise you), Andrew Garfield looks like the man to beat for Best Supporting actor at the 2027 Oscars for his portrayal of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial.
If he does so, it will be for playing the cinematic villain of the year. This is a performance that brings together all of Altman’s performative empathy and cringeworthy millennial ticks while also managing to project the simmering nihilism and sociopathy just behind the eyes. Utterly terrifying.
2. Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever
I have to admit that I wasn’t familiar with the name Ilya Sutskever when I sat down to watch Artificial, but the fact that Variety currently has Yura Borisov as an outside bet for a Best Actor nomination (in a stacked year) should tell you all you need to know about what he does with the role.
Although long favoured on the festival scene, Borisov’s career took a major leap forward when he played the heavy with the heart of gold in Anora two years ago. In Artifical, he plays Sutskever as a wide-eyed and idealistic genius who tragically falls for the false humility of Garfield’s Altman. As the movie convincingly suggests, that fall will be to the ultimate detriment of the world.
As dramatic arcs go, this is all fascinating to watch, but it’s the goofy warmth that Borisov brings to the role that keeps you interested, not least in his scenes with his mentor Geoffrey Hinton (a perfectly cast Mark Rylance). Garfield looks set to win the hardware, but Borisov is this movie’s heart and soul.
1. Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk
As someone who happily (if that’s the word) sat through all four hours of Gibney’s epic Musk documentary in Venice, I must say that what Barinholtz does with his limited screen time as the world’s richest man in Artificial is nothing short of remarkable. It's also viciously funny.
The temptation with these kinds of satirical performances is to go big, but to do so also runs the risk of coming off like a vapid SNL sketch. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that director Luca Guadagnino uses him so infrequently, but Barinholtz’s portrayal rises above a cheap roast or impersonation into something like absurdist performance art.
It’s the way he moves his hands when posing for a photo with a fan, or the way he scoffs at his lackeys, or the way he carries himself as this weird rockstar wannabe, a flukily-powerful king of the nerds. It's brilliant, it's scene stealing and, most chilling of all, it’s weirdly believable.
