Why 'Artificial' Works and 'The Social Reckoning' Doesn’t

VANITY FAIR - A Billion to One by Julia Black

My, how the tables have turned: Since I’ve seen early screeners of the Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison show The Altruists and the OpenAI film Artificial, current and former employees of OpenAI and FTX have been asking me for the scoop on how they’re represented. Some are already frustrated with how things went down. Former FTX COO Constance Wang told me, “I wasn’t consulted,” adding, “I did really feel physically unwell when I watched the trailer.” If you’d like to trade notes on either project, reach out to me on Signal: @mjnblack.09.

Meanwhile, the flood of tech-focused narratives continues to fill screens across the country. Over the weekend, I saw The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s room-temperature follow-up to his 2010 masterpiece The Social Network, which prompts such urgent questions as: “Who asked for this?”

I enlisted Vanity Fair’s features editor and expert on all things Hollywood, Hillary Busis, for a dialogue about which tech CEO impersonations worked, scenes that felt like major scoops, and Sorkin’s inexplicable loathing of the journalism profession.

Mentioned in this issue: Jon Ossoff, Alex Bores, JD Vance, David Shor, Jacob Reses, Cognition, Robert De Niro, Mark Zuckerberg, Grimes, Luca Guadagnino, Netflix, Andrew Garfield, Aaron Sorkin, Anna Myers, Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, AMD, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeremy Strong

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