'Silicon Valley' Season 6 Episode 5 promo shows flashy businessman Russ Hanneman return with new hair-brained scheme 'RussFest'
‘Maximizing Alphaness’, the fourth episode of ‘Silicon Valley’ Season 6 had a lot going on. But one of the more interesting parts of the episode was the origin story of a new Gavin Belson -- the advocate of “Tethics”.
After he lost Hooli to PiedPiper, Gavin (Matt Ross) was in the midst of an existential (and mid-life) crisis. In the midst of that, he wrote a book, ‘Cold Ice Cream and Hot Kisses’ -- a coming-of-age story.
The book was, as one would expect, not well-received. Not just because it was bad, but also because people expected Gavin Belson to write about tech. In an interview after a particularly bad dramatic reading of his book at a bookstore/coffee shop, a very-frustrated Belson burst out because he was called the head of a “failed tech company”.
Belson said, “I didn’t fail tech. Tech failed me. Tech failed all of us.” He added, “I didn’t write about tech, because tech destroys worlds. And I? I wanted to create them.”
Following his outburst, the news hailed him as an “anti-tech evangelist”. And perhaps Belson understood that this was his last chance to remain relevant in a world that had discarded him.
In the promo of episode 5, we see Belson is visiting news channels with his new ideology/book/petition -- “Tethics”, short for tech ethics. We see that even as Richard (Thomas Middleditch) says, “No one in town is ever gonna sign this hypocrite's hypocritical garbage,” he is asked by a PiedPiper employee wearing a “Tethics” t-shirt if he was going to sign the petition.
Viewers of ‘Silicon Valley’ know without a shadow of a doubt that when it comes to ethics, Gavin Belson is the last person anyone would look at. But it seems that everyone’s memory in the show has clearly failed them, after all, why else would anyone pay heed to Belson’s “hypocritical garbage”?
But Belson is not the only problem-child PiedPiper and Richard will have to face in episode 5. The promo marks the return of Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos). Hanneman, who is a multi-billionaire who claims to have “put radio on the internet”, had invested in Pied Piper after watching Richard freak out during TechCrunch.
Hanneman has been fashioned after ‘Shark Tank’ star and investor Mark Cuban, who incidentally got rich after he sold Broadcast.com, an internet radio company to Yahoo. Over the years, Russ has developed a reputation acquired along with flashy sports cars, calf implants, and a gratuitous lifestyle.
But this season sees Hanneman in more of a Billy McFarland-like avatar. For those who don’t remember, McFarland is a convicted fraudster who co-founded the “Fyre Festival”, through which, he defrauded investors of $27.4 million by marketing and selling tickets to the festival and other events.
In the ‘Silicon Valley’ promo, we see Hanneman return with a “Fyre Festival”-esque scheme called “RussFest” -- “Three days of partying at a plot of land so far out, even Nevada barely wants it.”
New episodes of ‘Silicon Valley’ premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.
