In 2005, Google debuted Google Earth, which stitches together millions of overlapping satellite photos and aerial plane pictures to create a 3D model of the planet Earth which you can search at will, hovering high above continents or zooming in so close you can switch over to Google Maps and explore the streets of far-off cities.
Google Earth has now been around for so long that people take its existence for granted, but it has a fascinating origin story dramatized in a little-remembered 2021 Netflix limited series that deserves another look.
Crack The Billion Dollar Code
Can you believe that Google may have done something unethical?
The Billion Dollar Code is a four-episode, German-language limited series that dropped on Netflix in 2021. Inspired by true events, it tells the story of Carsten Schlüter (Leonard Scheicher), a young digital artist living in Berlin in the early 1990s. He teams up with Juri Müller (Marius Ahrendt), a talented but reclusive computer programmer working with a hacking collective. Together, they create a design agency called ART+COM, staffed with Müller’s hacker buddies as well as Schlüter’s artist friends.
Carsten and Juri dream up an idea to have a 3D model of the globe that you can zoom in on even down to the point of an individual neighborhood, which should sound ring some bells. The two try to get funding, prepare high-stakes presentations to get funding, and eventually create Terravision, which brings their idea to life.
These sections recall any number of movies and TV shows about scrappy entrepreneurs striking out with a dream and a can-do attitude. The early sections of The Social Network, about the founding of Facebook, are like this. But that movie gets bleak fast and so does The Billion Dollar Club. We also periodically flash forward to 2017, when middle-aged versions of Carsten and Juri, now played by Mark Waschke and Mišel Matičević respectively, are embroiled in a patent infringement lawsuit against Google, accusing them of having stolen the idea and code for Terravision to create Google Earth.
The Billion Dollar Code is a familiar story, well-told
And that’s more than enough
There were no people actually named Carsten Schlüter and Juri Müller, but there were a lot of real programmers and artists at ART+COM that The Billion Dollar Code mashes together to form composite characters. ART+COM really did sue Google in 2014, alleging patent infringement. The company ultimately lost the case in 2017, when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed down its decision. At least in the eyes of the law, Google did not do anything wrong.
What about in the eyes of The Billion Dollar Code? The show is certainly sympathetic to Carsten and Juri, two starry-eyed kids in love with technology who have their ideas hoodwinked out from under them by an organization much bigger and more powerful than they are. The progression of the show resembles the progression of the internet age. In the ’90s, there was a sense that this new technology could help broaden the horizons of people around the world. Social media could bring people together, and big tech companies could lead us into a kinder, gentler, more peaceful new age.
Now, Meta is being accused of purposefully trying to get children addicted to its products, Google removed the motto “Don’t be evil” from the opening parts of its code of conduct, and there’s a general sense that the dream of technology making the world a better place was always naive and farfetched. The Billion Dollar Code captures some of that progression.
If you’ve seen shows like Halt and Catch Fire or even Silicon Valley, the rhythms of The Billion Dollar Code will be familiar to you. But even so, the show’s appreciation for the scrappy can-do attitude of the early technology boom helps it from becoming too much of a drag, and at just four episodes, it’s a pretty quick watch.
What does The Billion Dollar Code leave out?
Viva artistic license
Although I’m no expert, the dialogue in The Billion Dollar Code sounds very convincing; there’s plenty of realistic-sounding tech talk, or at least enough to convince this layperson that the producers did their homework.
That said, the details of the court case may have been fudged a bit. The reason the actual plaintiffs lost is because they couldn’t prove that their idea was so unique that Google couldn’t have developed Google Earth without stealing it; but in fact, there had been other attempts to create a 3D model of the Earth years before Terravision existed. The show also puts words in the mouths of certain defendants that aren’t reflected in the actual transcripts of the case.
Ultimately, that’s okay, because The Billion Dollar Code isn’t trying to be an ironclad historical record; it’s trying to be an entertaining TV show, and at that it succeeds. As long as you go in knowing that, you’ll have a good time.
What on (Google) Earth?
ART+COM still exists today, and is operating out of Berlin. Obviously Google Earth is as big as ever, and is getting new updates all the time.
There’s a sequel to The Social Network coming: The Social Reckoning, this one about the leak of hundreds of millions of Facebook records in 2021, some of which showed that the company knew that some of its products and services were doing harm to users but kept operating anyway. Clearly, the world of big tech is not done providing Hollywood with fodder for movies and TV shows.
- Release Date
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October 9, 2026
- Director
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Aaron Sorkin
- Writers
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Aaron Sorkin
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Mikey Madison
Frances Haugen
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Jeremy Allen White
Jeff Horowitz
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Jeremy Strong
Mark Zuckerberg
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