On ‘Industry’ as in the Real World, All Roads Lead to Epstein

It doesn’t take long for the fourth season of Industry to reveal the darker concerns of its characters, whom we’ve by now watched rise and fall in the world of global finance with the volatility of a penny stock. In this season’s first episode, the sexual proclivities of the users on an OnlyFans-like app called Tender take center stage, with its co-founder, played by a skeevy Kal Penn, professing his love of cuckold and Ebony porn. Indeed, the psychosexual desires and anxieties that many argue drive human behavior play a crucial role in this season’s undressing of capitalism’s more sinister forces. For all its financial jargon and trading-floor drama, Industry has always been a show about desire — who gets to have it, who gets to satisfy it, and who gets sacrificed in the process. This season just happened to unfold alongside the ongoing revelations of Jeffrey Epstein’s well-connected and well-financed pedophilic sex ring, a reminder that the show’s darkest instincts about wealth and power are rarely exaggerated. 

Season Four starts with the investigative journalist Jim Dycker, played by Charlie Heaton, hooking up with Hayley Clay, played by Kiernan Shipka, the newly minted assistant to Tender co-founder Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella). As Dycker tries to snoop on Hayley’s phone the following morning to further his reporting on Tender’s shady business dealings, she chases him out of the apartment, threatening to call her boyfriend, who she makes sure to note is Black — “and you know what that means,” she says to Dycker’s confusion. Race and sexuality intertwine throughout the season at an escalating pace. Later, we see Eric Tao (Ken Leung) surrounded by a harem of young Black women as he’s on the phone with Harper (Myha’la), who seemingly clocks his fetish. 

At every rung of the show’s social strata, sex is used as a means of control. At a 40th-birthday party for Kit Harington’s Sir Henry Muck, held at his family’s countryside estate, a rising Conservative politician being groomed for Chancellor of the Exchequer is discovered performing oral sex on Henry’s godfather, financier Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay). Mostyn later jokes that she and her brother share a talent for it, suggesting a long-running nature to the arrangement. And then there’s Harper and Whitney’s short-lived tryst, where he asks her to use a strap-on, revealing the would-be tech titan’s latent appetite for the taboo. In later episodes, we discover that Whitney has been using sexual blackmail as leverage over a number of key associates, most notably Eric, who is videotaped with a prostitute who is later revealed to be possibly underage. Henry’s wife Yasmin (Marisa Abela) ultimately convinces Hayley to accuse Dycker of assault, discrediting his story about Tender, and weaponizing #MeToo-era politics. Meanwhile, Yasmin, Hayley, and Henry’s threesome is dangled as yet another piece of kompromat, reinforcing how intimacy in Industry is constantly converted into leverage.

That Hayley — who reveals herself to be a former escort hired by Whitney — plays such a pivotal role as both a convenient victim and the one who actually procures young women for Whitney’s blackmail schemes is another point where reality and fiction begin to dovetail. In the show’s understanding of powerful men’s lust for young — often too young — women, Hayley and, subsequently, Yasmin are positioned as conduits between the elite and their transgressive desires, not unlike Ghislaine Maxwell’s role in Epstein’s broader scheme. The show’s creators have even suggested that Yasmin’s fate was almost inevitable. As co-showrunner Konrad Kay put it in a recent interview with GQ, the finale represents “the logical conclusion of someone who always had those characteristics,” describing her long-standing attraction to power and willingness to manipulate vulnerable people.

As Yasmin takes the reins of Whitney’s blackmail empire, the rotten core of the whole capitalist system is laid bare. Following her divorce from Henry, Yasmin and her former father-in-law, media magnate Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), try their hand at politics, offering financial support to Conservative politician Sebastian Stefanowicz (Edward Holcroft). She organizes a fundraising dinner for a group of far-right extremists who would presumably back Stefanowicz. Quite literal Nazis, a mother and son who sold their Austrian family bank to Tender, are seated next to Harper. They seem at once repulsed and fascinated by her Blackness. At the dinner table, surrounded by financiers, politicians, and tech founders, the conversation drifts casually toward breeding, inheritance, and the preservation of elite bloodlines, revealing the worldview quietly underwriting the entire power structure.

At the root of the trove of emails and depositions from Jeffrey Epstein released to the public is a concerningly underreported obsession with race and eugenics. Epstein famously discussed plans to impregnate multiple women at his New Mexico ranch in order to seed the human race with his DNA. And in testimony unsealed from the Giuffre v. Maxwell case, one accuser said Epstein directed recruiters that he did not want Black girls, preferring young white girls instead — an instruction that sits uncomfortably alongside his fixation on genetic “improvement.” 

The worldview animating these scandals isn’t confined to disgraced financiers. On Elon Musk’s X and among influential right-wing thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, the fixation is even more overt. Yarvin has repeatedly argued that democracy should be replaced by a “CEO-style” monarchy run by a cognitive elite, while Musk has warned that declining birth rates among educated people pose a civilizational threat and has frequently encouraged high fertility among the “smart” and “competent.”

The Epstein files exposed the belief system of the ultra-rich: that they are, in some essential way, a different species. It’s a worldview baked into modern capitalism itself — born in the hierarchies of the transatlantic slave trade — where some people exist to extract from others, and some exist to be extracted from. That’s how the elites in Industry, like the ones in the real world, can treat people like playthings. To them, we are.