It wasn’t all that long ago that “tech bros” were a unique character to introduce into the plot of a movie or television show. That’s not the case anymore. In fact, a quick perusal of your favorite streaming service will reveal several current and/or recent movies and series that feature “tech bros” as the main character. A tech bro is, obviously, a bro that works in the technology industry, and is often part of the larger “bro” culture of a hypermasculine man and how he relates to the world around him. They are also called programmers and for those into cryptocurrency, ‘cyrptobros.’

Now, we’re using “bros” generally. Not all the technology founders and executives are men, of course. Hulu’s addictive show The Dropoutfeatures the meteoric rise and catastrophic failure of possibly the tech founder with the most hubris of them all: Elizabeth Holmes. Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, wife of WeWork founder Adam Neumann is another female entrant in this category and played by Anne Hathaway in WeCrashed.

Now that we’ve clarified that, consider the fact that these tech bro characters (the Adam Neumanns and the Travis Kalanicks of the world) are also essentially the villains of the movies and series they are featured in. After all, if Neumann hadn’t run through billions and been forced out of his own company, there wouldn’t be a story to tell in Apple TV+’s WeCrashed. The same thing is true for Uber founder Kalanick and Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

Is the fact that the public now considers these once-lauded entrepreneurs to be villains and criminals a sign of class consciousness about the growing awareness of the vast income inequality between tech execs and the average worker? Is it the dissatisfaction with capitalism’s laser-like focus on business and profit over everything else? Whatever the case, perhaps it is good that the most obnoxious and arrogant tech bros are no longer being held up as paragons of virtue and entrepreneurship, with the majority of people thinking, ’thanks for Uber and Facebook, now please fade into the background forever and enjoy your billions alone.'

Our list of the most obnoxious and arrogant tech bros is a mix of film and television series, which also blend real-life and fictional characters.

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8 Silicon Valley – Richard Hendricks, Erich Bachman, Gavin Belson

     Warner Bros. Television Distribution

HBO’s Silicon Valley ran for six seasons starting in 2014 and chronicled the rise and fall and foibles of a fictional app called Pied Piper and its founder Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch). Richard was an employee of the fictional tech company Hooli, run by Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), who has Pied Piper’s algorithm copied in an attempt to beat Richard’s app to market. Richard and his team of programmers live in tech entrepreneur Erich Bachman’s (T.J. Miller) incubator house and tho Bachman appears to have good intentions, he also throws up roadblocks for Richard and his team. Over the course of the show, Richard attempts to secure venture capital funding for his app, is removed as CEO, and regains the CEO position. All along, he, Bachman, and Belson, portray three different versions of the tech bro persona – the arrogance, the obnoxiousness, and the narcissism.

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Ironically, in real life, Middleditch proved to be a bit of a bro himself when he publicly declared that swinging saved his marriage. This was apparently news to his now ex-wife, and the two are divorced. Miller also ran afoul of the law in a real tech bro way, and was accused of sexually assaulting his college girlfriend and making a bomb threat on an Amtrak train, and was arrested for assaulting an Uber driver.

7 Good Trouble – Evan Speck

     Disney–ABC Domestic Television

Good Trouble is a spin-off of The Fosters that follows the post-college adventures of Callie Adams-Foster (Maia Mitchell) and Mariana Adams-Foster (Cierra Ramirez). Mariana is a programmer who works for the company Spekulate for a time. The CEO and founder of Spekulate, Evan Speck, pursues Mariana romantically, despite the fact that she’s involved with another Spekulate employee. Speck is considered to be a technological genius, and he nearly bullies his way into getting what he wants with his high opinion of himself and the trademark narcissism of a tech bro. That said, Speck deviates from the classic tech bro profile by having social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

6 The Social Network – Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker

     Sony Pictures Releasing

The Social Network came out in 2010 and chronicled the early days and rise of Facebook from the time it was called The Facebook in a Harvard dorm to its move to Palo Alto and the involvement of Napster founder Sean Parker. This film is littered with tech bro types from Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), to Parker (Justin Timberlake), to Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), to the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer). For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on Zuckerberg and Parker. Zuckerberg is a classic tech bro. He runs Facebook the way he wants to and doesn’t care who it might hurt (nor if it helped promote a campaign of disinformation that led to the rise of and eventual election of Donald Trump). Parker’s Big Sur wedding famously cost $10 million and ran afoul of the California Coastal Commission because he didn’t secure the proper permits for the event.

5 Made for Love – Byron Gogol

     Warner Bros. / Interactive Entertainment

HBO’s Made For Love follows the story of Hazel Green (Cristin Milioti), who was married to a billionaire tech CEO named Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen). The show starts when she leaves him after 10 years of living in an enormous virtual reality complex together. Unfortunately for Hazel, her ex is a massive douchebag tech bro who implanted a device in her brain called “Made for Love” so that he can see everything she sees and feel everything she feels. He tracks her every move so that he knows where she is at all times, in this show which dissects abuse while remaining hilarious. If that isn’t obnoxious, arrogant, and very tech bro-y, we don’t know what is.

RELATED: Why Audiences Can’t Stop Binging Recent Docudramas

4 Ex Machina – Nathan Bateman

     A24

A perfect example of the tech bro as the villain is Nathan Bateman (a great Oscar Isaac performance) from the 2014 sci-fi film Ex-Machina. Bateman is the billionaire founder of the fictional search engine Blue Book. His search engine accounts for more than 90% of all search traffic. With his multiple billions, Bateman begins to build AI robots with the aim of having them replace women and become the mates and servants of men. This is how Ava is born. Ava is an AI woman robot that Bateman tries to pass off as human.

3 Don’t Look Up – Peter Isherwell

     Netflix

Netflix’s 2021 movie Don’t Look Up has the tagline, “based on truly possible events,” and is a satirical metaphor (and hyperbole) for the Trump Administration, climate change, COVID-19, and the way society elevated billionaire tech moguls. Two astronomers (Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet on a collision course with the Earth and try to get the government, the scientific community, the media, and people in general to take them seriously, but they discover no one really cares.

Instead, people are caught up in their own shallow pursuits. All the characters are based on real people. The movie’s Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) is a mash-up of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. He’s the CEO of Bash Cellular and a textbook example of a tech bro. He prioritizes money over the climate crisis, is fascinated with space travel, and uses his company to sell his customer’s personal data as well as predict their deaths.

RELATED: WeCrashed Review: Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway Are Incredible in So-So Series

2 Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber – Travis Kalanick

     Showtime

Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber is a new series on Showtime starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber who was ousted from his own company. Kalanick was forced to resign from Uber in 2017 after a series of scandals relating to privacy as well as complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination at the startup. In the trailer for the series, Gordon-Levitt as Kalanick says “I am not a monster.” Well, audiences might beg to differ on that statement after the antics of tech bro Kalanick are revealed. Sure, Uber changed the way we get from place to place (and annoyed taxi cab drivers), but along the way, Kalanick’s high opinion of himself became so overblown that the only logical conclusion for that much arrogance and narcissism was implosion.

1 WeCrashed: Adam Neumann

     Apple TV+

Apple TV+’s WeCrashed is a voyeuristic look into the founding, ascent, and descent of WeWork, its messianic founder Adam Neumann, and his wife, the fame hungry cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, Rebecka Paltrow Neumann. The sublime performances of Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway make WeCrashed must see TV. It’s also impossible to truly grasp all that went on and all the billions of dollars Neumann ran through as WeWork grew from an office-sharing startup to a company that wanted to run the way people live all aspects of their lives.

The hubris of Jared Leto’s Adam Neumann is off the charts. Neumann saw himself as a savior and created a cult-like atmosphere at his company. Adam was forced out of WeWork after a postponed IPO (the episode where the couple ditches the traditional S-1 in favor of a picture-book style presentation is truly astounding). He has recently resurfaced as the CEO of a crypto credit start up. Of course he has. What else would a tech bro of Neumann’s infamy do?