‘Industry’ season 4 captures tech fraud better than any show on TV right now

HBO’s hit financial thriller “Industry” has delivered one of its most compelling storylines yet this season: a hunt to expose a fraudulent fintech company called Tender.

The show follows Harper Stern, who’s leading her newly launched investment firm and looking for a company to short — essentially, betting that its stock will crash. After a journalist tips her off that something’s wrong with Tender, she sends her associates, Sweetpea and Kwabena, to Ghana to investigate.

What they discover is damning. “Fake users drive fake revenue drives fake cash,” Sweetpea tells Harper. The entire company appears to be built on fabricated numbers. “The thing is nothing.”

What’s fascinating about this season of “Industry” is how well it speaks to this moment. Tender starts as a payment processing platform for adult content. The show references the very real (and still controversial) Online Safety Bill that the UK introduced, which has led to age verification and other enhanced rules for consuming adult content online. Because of its affiliation with adult content, Tender finds itself at odds with the new government’s regulation and must pivot or die, as the saying goes. 

Its CFO-turned-leader, Whitney, wants the company to pivot into a bank and has a plan to make that happen, including making Tender’s CEO, Henry, the face of that transformation. Whitney is the embodiment of every tech baron cliche. Move fast, break things. Win at all costs. He’s lobbying politicians for a banking license and hunting for merger opportunities.

Harper, meanwhile, is leading her newly launched firm after feeling undermined at her previous firm and being called a DEI plant by the man who hired her (a nod to the decline of DEI in the past few years). She has teamed up with new friends and old frenemies and is looking for blood — meaning a company on the precipice of crashing. To her, Tender is that company.

This puts her at odds with her friend Yasmin, who is married to Henry and is crafting communication and lobbying strategies for Tender. It’s pride and prejudice — the sugar and spice that help make the world go round. 

The show nails the tech world with such accuracy that reality itself starts to feel like satire. Even TechCrunch gets name-checked as part of Tender’s media playbook.

There is commentary on fascism via the character Moritz, who lobbies against Western liberalism and is hesitant to sell his family’s bank to Whitney, whose last name is the Jewish-sounding Halberstram. The character is perhaps a nod to the rising “technofacism” criticism of some tech barons.

Harper, meanwhile, is still a calculating sociopath. “My real passion lies with finding dead men walking,” she says at an investor breakfast. She ends up raising millions for her new firm. 

She is the one character whose existence strains credibility. Personality-wise, she has to be shrewdly calculating; unlike Yasmin and Henry, she has nothing to fall back on should she fail. But would the UK establishment, which is notoriously insular, exclusionary, and white, really let a Black American woman rise through their ranks and beat them at their own game?

“Who needs realism when she’s such a great character,” one Black British founder told me.

He said the show aptly captures how detached the UK upper class is from consequence and is actually one of the few shows he’s seen that “accurately portrays the ruthlessness of the British elite, specifically how they maneuver the media and governments to suit their own whims.” 

“Nepotism and lack of boundaries at work, people sleeping together for trade secrets, is very realistic and common, unfortunately,” one European investor added. 

Meanwhile, Yasmin is headed down a dark path. Earlier this season, she organized a ménage à trois between her husband, Henry, and Whitney’s assistant, Hayley. As the season continues, her behavior becomes so hedonistic that one reviewer has already likened her to Ghislaine Maxwell — perhaps a perfect emblem of what lies at the pits of money and power, and the role some women play in digging those holes. 

An Icarus moment could be on the way, however, at least for Whitney.

By now, the audience is familiar with how founders in the real world sometimes use deception to overinflate success (like Charlie Javice’s Frank) and allegedly steal from investors and the public (the FTX crypto crash). There are many such infamous cases, and some are even referenced in the show. But perhaps the most relevant real-world parallel for Tender would be the ultimate implosion of the German fintech Wirecard a few years ago.

Wirecard admitted that the billions in cash it reported having likely never existed, despite the company’s earlier claims that two banks in the Philippines were holding the funds. It was a tale of complex accounting and legal gray zones — much like the financial fraud depicted in Tender. Short sellers went after Wirecard, too, and one blog dubbed them “alternative whistleblowers” — people who step in when “the market, and the regulator, refuse to see what is right in front of them.”

The philosophy is one that one could easily see Harper embracing soon enough, especially after Eric tells her at one point that “short-only work is ugly, hard, investigative,” and that it’s “anti-status quo, anti-establishment, anti-power.”

With Wirecard, numerous people, including the CEO, were arrested, 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 run. 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 audacious in its demeanor that the audience is forced to pick their favorite anti-hero and go along for the ride.

It’s a rush, a thrill; the visual embodiment of the absence of ethical capitalists. And yet, just like in real life, we can’t get enough.