Zach Woods Celebrates the 10-Year Anniversary of ‘Silicon Valley’ With An Apology to Tech Billionaires

It’s been over a decade since Silicon Valley perfectly parodied Big Tech and its many billionaires. Ten years is a long time to wait for an apology if you’re in the Three Comma Club.

When Silicon Valley creator and sitcom savant Mike Judge first set out to satirize the culture surrounding the tech industry, with all its start-ups, buzzwords and eccentric a-hole billionaires, he drew upon his own brief experience working as a computer programmer at a computer graphics card manufacturer in the late 1980s. Judge made a point to hire writers and consultants with contemporary knowledge of tech culture, and when HBO aired the first episode of Silicon Valley in 2014, the story of a ragtag team of brilliant coders struggling to get their company off the ground immediately struck a chord with underappreciated programmers across Northern California.

However, for all the fans that Silicon Valley won in the lower rungs of the tech industry, is critical acclaim and commercial success really worth it if it comes at the cost of Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings? According to series star Zach Woods, the answer is absolutely not:

Though Judge and Silicon Valley showrunner Alec Berg were careful not to explicitly name the real-life tech giants on whom they based the many meddling billionaire characters in their iconoclastic comedy, tech industry insiders quickly understood that characters like Gavin Belson were supposed to be combinations of megalomaniacal CEOs, founders and figureheads like former Google CEO Larry Page and current Salesforce head Marc Benioff. Peter Gregory was an apparent analog for aloof PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and Russ Hanneman was obviously a younger, fitter, slightly more deranged version of billionaire TV star Mark Cuban.

But, as noted by Woods, who played the fan-favorite punching bag Jared on Silicon Valley, he and his team deserve uppercuts and haymakers galore from the movers and shakers of tech for daring to tease them about their pseudo-spiritual guru bullshit or their blood boys for six successful seasons. As Woods noted, Elon Musk is willing to publicly bully his own child for being transgender — how do you think he’d react to the show’s insinuation that silver-spoon billionaires are out-of-touch with their workers and basic reality? 

Thank God the show never dared to point out that Musk didn’t actually found Tesla and simply bought the title of “founder” from the real geniuses, or he’d need a week-long debrief with Jordan Peterson.

It’s big of Woods to acknowledge how unfair both he and Silicon Valley had been to the most petty and powerful men in America. Hopefully, this mea culpa will pave the way for other HBO shows to make amends for their misguided mockery — David Simon and The Wire are overdue for an apology to the trapeze community.