HBO’s hit financial thriller “Industry” delivered one of its most compelling stories this season: the hunt to expose a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.
The show follows Harper Stern, who runs her fledgling investment firm and looks for a company to short – essentially betting that its stock will fall. After a journalist alerts her that something is wrong with Tender, she sends her companions, Sweetpea and Kwabena, to Ghana to investigate.
What they discover is damning. “Fake users generate fake revenue and fake money,” Sweetpea tells Harper. The whole company seems to be built on manufactured numbers. “That thing is nothing.
What’s fascinating about this season of “Industry” is how well it speaks to the moment. Tender starts as a payment processing platform for adult content. The show references the very real (and still controversial) online safety law the UK introduced that led to age verification and other improved rules for consuming adult content online. Because of its affiliation with adult content, Tender finds itself at odds with the new government’s edict and must turn or die, as the saying goes.
Its CFO, Whitney, wants the company to transform into a bank and has a plan to do it, including making Tender’s CEO, Henry, the face of that transformation. Whitney is the epitome of every tech baron cliché. Move fast, break things. Win at any cost. He lobbies politicians for a banking license and looks for merger opportunities.
Harper, meanwhile, runs her newly formed firm after feeling undermined at her previous firm and the man who hired her calling it a DEI plant (a nod to DEI’s decline over the past few years). Bonding with new friends and old frenemies, she’s out for blood — meaning a society on the brink of collapse. For her, Tender is the company.
This puts her at odds with her friend Yasmin, who is married to Henry and creates communications and lobbying strategies for Tender. It’s Pride and Prejudice – the sugar and spice that helps make the world go round.
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The show draws on the tech world with such precision that reality itself begins to feel like satire. Even TechCrunch is vetted as part of the Tender media list.
Fascism is commented on through the character of Moritz, who lobbies against Western liberalism and is hesitant to sell his family’s bank, Whitney, whose last name is the Jewish-sounding Halberstram. The figure is perhaps a nod to the growing criticism of the “technofascism” of some tech barons.
Harper, meanwhile, is still a calculating sociopath. “My real passion is finding dead men walking,” he says at an investors’ breakfast. He ends up raising millions for his new business.
He is the only character whose existence strains credibility. As for personality, he must be shrewdly calculating; unlike Yasmin and Henry, she has nothing to fall back on if she fails. But would the notoriously insular, exclusionary and white British establishment really let a black American woman infiltrate their ranks and beat them at their own game?
“Who needs realism when he’s such a great character,” one Black British founder told me.
He said the show aptly captures how detached the British upper class is from the consequences, and is actually one of the few shows he’s seen that “accurately portrays the ruthlessness of the British elite, namely how they maneuver the media and governments to follow their own whims”.
“Nepotism and the lack of boundaries at work, people sleeping together because of trade secrets, is unfortunately very realistic and common,” added one European investor.
Meanwhile, Yasmin heads down a dark path. Earlier this season, she orchestrated a ménage à trois between her husband Henry and Whitney’s assistant Hayley. As the season goes on, her behavior becomes so self-indulgent that one reviewer already likes her to Ghislaine Maxwell—perhaps the perfect symbol of what lies in the pits of money and power, and the role some women play in digging those holes.
However, an Icarus moment could be on the way, at least for Whitney.
Now the audience is familiar with how real-world founders sometimes use disappointment to overstate success (like Frank Charlie Javice) and allegedly rip off investors and the public (FTX cryptocurrency crash). There are many such infamous cases and some are even referenced in the show. But perhaps the most important real-world parallel for Tender would be the eventual implosion of German fintech Wirecard a few years ago.
Wirecard admitted that the billions in cash it reported probably never existed, even though it was believed to be held by two banks in the Philippines. It was a story about complex accounting and legal gray areas like Tender. Short sellers went after Wirecard, too, and one blog called them “alternative whistleblowers” — people who step in when “the market and the regulator refuse to see what’s right in front of them.”
It’s a speech one could easily see Harper giving soon enough after Eric tells her at one point that “only short work is ugly, hard, investigative” and that he’s “anti-status quo, anti-establishment, anti-power.” Her work looks almost done.
Many people were arrested with Wirecard, including the CEO, while the COO went on the run (and was also accused of being a Russian spy). Tender’s fate remains unrealized until the last few episodes. One of the best parts about “Industry” is that it moves fast and breaks things. It is so clearly set in our time and so bold in its behavior that the audience is forced to choose their favorite anti-hero and go on the journey.
It’s a rush, a thrill; a visual embodiment of the absence of ethical capitalists. And yet, just like in real life, we can never have enough.