Dylan Gould

"I want to survive! You think I wanted this? I inherited a client, either I deliver good or I end up iced!"

- Dylan, explaining his affiliation with the Decepticons.

Dylan Gould is a supporting antagonist of the 2011 film Transformers: Dark of the Moon. He is the CEO of Hotchkiss Gould Investments who is in league with the Decepticons.

He was portrayed by Patrick Dempsey (in his first antagonistic role).

Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Dylan Gould owns a multi-international car company known as Hotchkiss Gould Investments which Carly works for. Dylan reveals he is a human that works for the Decepticons when he tells Sam and Carly "My father always said when the war isn't yours, always join the winning side". When Sam and Carly begin to run from him he asks his maid if his revelation was too forward.

Dylan forces Sam into wearing a Decepticon watch that will try to obtain any Autobot secrets or tactics. When Sam tells Dylan that the Autobots have no plans of retaliation, Dylan then tells him he knew this was going to happen and orders Starscream to shoot down the ship carrying the Autobots. Dylan tried to keep Sam's girlfriend Carly captive and as his future wife.

Sam and the others rescue Carly and they shoot Dylan's penthouse. Laserbeak, Dylan's bodyguard, failed to kill Sam while Carly escaped from Dylan's evil henchman. Bumblebee killed all of Dylan's human bodyguards/allies who were working for Dylan. Dylan quickly notified Megatron about the entire situation and the Decepticon warships went looking for the Autobots.

In retaliation, Dylan commands Soundwave to shoot and kill the captive Autobots, beginning with Que getting killed by Barricade. However, the Autobots escape and killed most of the Decepticons. At the request of Sentinel Prime, Dylan attempts to restart the Control Pillar, only to have a confrontation with a perusing Sam. Dylan thinks that Sam wasn't going to kill him and taunted him, but Dylan is eventually killed when Sam hits him in the head with a metal rod with a cement block attached to it causing him to fall back in the Control Pillar electrocuting him to death. Dylan died in vain when the Control Pillar is destroyed and Earth is saved as well as avenging the Autobots that were killed in The Battle Of Chicago.

"Dylan Gould: I just saved a whole other world! You think you're a hero, huh? YOU THINK YOU’RE A HERO?! Sam Witwicky: "No, I'm just a messenger. AHH!""

- Dylan's last words with Sam before he met his demise.

Transformers: Age of Extinction
In spite of his death and not being mentioned in the fourth sequel, Dylan Gould, Sentinel Prime, and the Decepticons' actions are what caused the chance for humanity and Autobots' chance to reconcile over disaster that they caused to become slim to none, aside from the presumably huge damage on the already dying Cybertron. This was proven when Cemetery Wind, which formed to dispatch surviving Decepticons, began targeting the unwilling Autobots until only six of them were left (namely Hound, Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, Drift, Crosshairs, and Brains).

Though not directly, he was responsible for the deaths of an untold number of civilians including James Savoy's sister, leading to Savoy's start of darkness and turning him genocidally insane as a commander of Cemetery Wind. His crime records in Chicago also supported Attinger's agenda to convince humanity to wipe out Cybertronian survivors on Earth (except Lockdown whom he made a deal with) and manipulate Joshua Joyce and KSI as his pawns to do so by creating an army of artificial transformers.

Fortunately, all of their plans were stopped by the reluctant Autobot survivors alongside freed Dinobots and their human allies (particularly Joshua who redeemed himself near the climax and supported the Autobots and their human allies against Galvatron, Cemetery Wind and rogue KSI drones, as well as Cade Yeager, his daughter Tessa and her boyfriend Shane).

The tension between humanity and Autobots that Dylan posthumously built did not lessen after the events of Age of Extinction, and the humans attempted to continue Cemetery Wind's efforts in The Last Knight.

Personality
Dylan Gould was a selfish coward who only cared about himself. All he was capable of thinking about was his own well being and safety without noticing good or evil. In fact, the concept of good and evil never seemed to cross his mind even once as he never gave an implication that he thought or knew the Decepticons were the bad guys (though he doubtless did know). He didn't think too much of humanity and even after the Pillar was deactivated he restarted it, showing that he would have ended his own world just to survive.

Trivia

 * As the movie progresses, Dylan and Carly appear to have some history together. It is possible that they were boyfriend and girlfriend (if that were true, that would mean that Carly was either cheating on Sam or was in a forced relationship with Dylan).
 * Even though it appears that Autobots are winning the war, Dylan still continues to work for the Decepticons when he turns on the Control Pillar mostly likely due to the fact that if the Autobots win, he will rot in jail for what he has done. However, Bumblebee and Ratchet destroyed the Control Pillar and caused Dylan's death.
 * Since Dylan's actions led to the plot of Age of Extinction and The Last Knight, his actions could be considered a Villainous Legacy.
 * He is the first human villain in the live-action movie continuity, while almost every Transformers cartoon had more than one human antagonist. He is also the first villain in the Transformers franchise to be a wife stealer, making him similar to traditional villains who made innocent women into damsels-in-distress.
 * Dylan once states that he gained the job for working with the Decepticons when his father died.
 * Dylan seems to be a secondary Decepticon leader, as he is shown ordering Soundwave to execute the captured Autobots, but is also the first human Decepticon leader.
 * Ironically, he sided with the Decepticons to survive, but only to be killed by Sam (ally to the Autobots).
 * Dylan Gould is loosely based on Shawn Berger, a Decepticon-allied human businessman from the original G1 Transformers, though he bears more cues to Ali, another Decepticon-allied human, than Berger.
 * In the IDW Comics, Dylan is portrayed as Pure Evil.