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“They can’t decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they’re mystified by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will never have—there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but that’s the way it is, and it kills them.” Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. “I think he was thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be, because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says ‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like, Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants a picture with.”

The three biggest public companies in the world, as measured by market capitalization, are Apple, the Google parent company Alphabet, and Microsoft. Are they enlightened agents of philanthrocapitalism or robber-baron monopolies? “In the real Silicon Valley, as on the show, there is a cohort of people who have a real sense of purpose and actually think they’re going to change the world, and then there’s a cohort of people who say farcical things about their apps that they clearly don’t believe themselves,” Sam Altman, who runs the startup incubator Y Combinator, told me. The show accurately reflects this complexity because the people who make it—like all thoughtful people, including the most powerful people in Silicon Valley—can’t decide how they feel about Silicon Valley. “I swing back and forth,” Clay Tarver, one of the show’s writers and producers, told me. “The more I meet these people and learn about them, the more I come away thinking that, despite all the bullshit and greed, there actually is something exciting and hopeful going on up there.”

In an upcoming episode, Pied Piper’s sales department commissions a pompous, vacuous ad. “Any person can sit at a table,” the voice-over goes. “Tables are for people to be together and share. And that is why tables are like Pied Piper.”

Around the time this scene was filmed, Uber released an ad in a similar rhetorical register: “Consider the atom. Born 13.8 billion years ago, the atom is responsible for everything from the B.L.T. to moms everywhere to New York City.… Until a few short years ago, atoms and bits existed in entirely different worlds. But then something happened. At Uber, we asked, What if we brought these two worlds together?” Between takes, Thomas Middleditch, who plays Richard Hendricks, and Zach Woods, who plays Pied Piper’s tenderhearted chief financial officer, watched the Uber ad on a smartphone, chuckling incredulously. Woods sat down next to Tarver and Dan O’Keefe, who were sitting in canvas director’s chairs, watching a set of video monitors. Woods showed them the Uber ad and asked, “Is this what you guys based it on?”

“Actually, this came out after we wrote the episode,” Tarver said. “We were thinking of a different one, a Facebook one.”

“‘Facebook is chairs,’” O’Keefe said.

“No way,” Woods said. “Really?”

“All the big companies make these now,” Tarver said. “It reminds me of the first Viagra commercials, where they wanted to be as vague as possible because they were embarrassed of what the product actually was.”

“I think it’s a combination of the pretentiousness of the people involved and their total market penetration,” O’Keefe s

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