Their names are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page and they inspire everyone’s imagination. To unravel the truth from the lie about these wealthy and controversial figures, a new four-episode documentary series traces their meteoric rise, follies and setbacks over three decades.
Jeff Bezos, the pioneer
“There are few people in history who have had such an impact on humanity,” the series says at the start of each episode, and it’s difficult to prove otherwise. Whether we like it or not, Silicon Valley’s big bosses did indeed change the world by exploiting the Internet revolution in the 1990s and 2000s. This documentary series, produced by Paramount+, aims above all to remember how they returned to the origins of most GAFAM companies.
So the first episode goes back to 1994, where we see American Vice President Al Gore extolling the virtues of an Internet that was then inaccessible to the general public. Obviously, the United States quickly recognized the economic potential of this revolution and it must be recognized that Jeff Bezos was a pioneer.
The series shows him quitting his job on Wall Street and heading to Seattle, where he pitches his idea for an online bookstore that can deliver any book anywhere, while boasting about living in dingy offices to do it to invest all the money in the development of Amazon. We know what happens next, but the series is also reminiscent of the explosion of the Internet bubble in the early 2000s, after crazy years in which shareholders invested heavily in everything and everyone in the stock market.
Mark Zuckerberg, the introvert
The second episode is largely dedicated to the founding of Google by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a room at Stanford University, a legendary episode in the history of Silicon Valley, which is told here using numerous archives from that time and filmed in the company of the two young people became geeks.
We see the latter two extolling their famous “Don’t be evil” philosophy, a motto that is quickly confronted with shareholders’ desire to make Google money, which the company will achieve with targeted advertising on an unprecedented scale, as said by several former employees at the time.
The 2000s also saw the birth of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, another young geek who began his crazy adventure in his Stanford hotel room. The archives that then show the world’s youngest billionaire are undoubtedly the most fascinating of the series. We see a teenager who is increasingly overwhelmed by a creation that is too monstrous for him, very self-confident in private but completely paralyzed as soon as he has to intervene in public.
That’s easy to understand since he’s also the one who has experienced the most scandals, and the series highlights some of them, from Facebook’s controversial privacy policy to Russia’s election interference before Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
Elon Musk, the “Savior of Humanity”
But before that, there was the entire Silicon Valley’s honeymoon with the Obama administration (2008-2016), an eight-year love story largely detailed in the third episode, where we understand how this new generation of billionaires began to emerge to seriously engage with the government for the first time in Washington, at a time when their faces are still seen as agents of progress in the United States.
Elon Musk also illustrates this time of hope well, and the series recalls that he signed a contract with Obama for SpaceX to become NASA’s official private supplier, after a difficult launch with its rockets, as in the first years of its existence Tesla electric cars, which has already been discussed in detail in another documentary series, The Elon Musk Show (CANAL+)..
What interests us today ends with an episode dedicated to the completely disproportionate space ambitions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who no longer know what to do with their billions and believe they can “save humanity” by they colonize other planets. If only they could use their wealth to make our planet better today.
Billionaires, the Reign of the Geeks, a PLANETE+ documentary series, available on CANAL+.