The ‘Industry’ Season 5 Plot Prediction Market

“Are you done?” asks a stewardess, twice, at the bitter end of Season 4 of Industry, the hotshot and hot-to-trot HBO series about following the money. She never gets a clear answer on the show. But recently, we learned that Industry itself isn’t finished just yet. Shortly before the riveting, horrifying Season 4 finale, “Both, And,” aired on Sunday, HBO announced that it had ordered another round of Industry, giving the show a fifth and final installment.

What might that swan song season look like? Already, Industry has featured insider trading, murder, margin calls, sexual harassment, twin studies, beard glue, broken and/or befouled mirrors, international espionage, and a grizzled editor with a cool, huge dog. The show has transported its characters and viewers to France, Austria, Ghana, the New York metropolitan area (ever so briefly), and deadly international waters. Industry’s showrunners, along with many of its actors and characters, began this strange trip mostly as newbies and have grown famous and even influential in the years since. Now, the world is their oyster (although this show has already featured quite the oyster). 

Here, in the spirit of gray areas and great characters, is The Ringer’s mini prediction market for how Season 5 might shake out. The price listed next to each prediction represents the cost of a YES bet; if you’re right, you receive one (1) dollar. We won’t take any fees, although, like any prediction market worth its salt, we do reserve all rights to simply take your money and run. Happy spending, and see you next season.

Prediction markets will figure into the plot in a big way: 93¢

A pal of mine (who recently binged all four seasons of Industry in a two-week span, which had to have been hazardous to his health) made this call following the finale, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. There might be no better nexus of all of Industry’s interests—blurry legality, silly interactions with major stakes, political adjacency, zero-sum games—than the emerging prediction markets space, à la Polymarket and Kalshi. (Betcha that Industry’s version is called “Betcha.”) 

The possibilities are endless: Hayley uses her kompromat to influence outcomes and make a little side money. Harper tries to return Eric’s $10 million, only to find that he’s now worth 50 times that because a small angel investment he made in Betcha paid off. Some bettor keeps scooping Norton News’ headlines—but who?! And so on. The hard part here will be finding fiction that’s stranger than the truth.

Harper Stern and Yasmin Hanani will go head-to-head: 99¢

Hey, they’re sellin’ dollars for 99 cents! Harper and Yasmin are the central relationship in Industry, outlasting just about all the other characters and their conflicts on the show. “How do we keep these two coming back to each other after they do and say the most horrendous things?” Myha’la, who plays Harper, asked me at the beginning of Season 4. “How do we keep getting them in a room together? Because they’re desperate for it.” Season 4’s finale, in which Yasmin rejected Harper and told her to leave a room, only intensified their story. It wouldn’t be a season of Industry if these two didn’t have some kind of face-off—usually with the words “lonely” and/or “jealous” involved—that leaves one or both of them figuratively or literally slapped in the face. 

Harper and Yasmin will forge an uneasy alliance: 67¢

The real question is whether the two of them will find that actually, they kinda need each other to thrive (or even just to survive). Maybe Harper will require a capital infusion for her fund and ask an old pal for a helping hand. Maybe Yasmin will come to her senses (or come to see that she’s far less necessary and more vulnerable than she thought) and need Harper’s market-moving magic to fight the dark powers Yasmin helped unleash. Maybe they’ll wind up stranded by a snowstorm at the Yellowstone Club and have an important heart-to-heart—or real estate investment idea. The potentially more interesting outcome is the other one-in-three chance: that these two will just spiral further and further apart until one or both of them winds up dead, in prison—or in charge. 

Sebastian Stefanowicz and Otto Mostyn will appear in a scene together: 88¢

To be sure, Industry’s send-off doesn’t need to flow directly from the Season 4 finale. (And the showrunners have a history of changing tacks anyway—remember the end of Season 3, when Harper agreed to go work in New York?) But if the show were to pick up where “Both, And” left off, it seems as though the far-right rising Reform Party candidate Sebastian Stefanowicz, with his neofascist leanings and his chiseled jawline, would be involved. How might that pursuit of power rub our favorite elitist macher and member of the House of Lords, Otto Mostyn? The way I see it, Industry has already given us strap-ons and sex dens. All I’m asking for is the platonic (unless …) pleasure of these two dickheads sharing a scene.

The show will travel to:

The Bay Area: 93¢

Los Angeles: 69¢

Washington, D.C.: 29¢

New York: 22¢

The Industry showrunners have said that their goal is to “follow the money.” Which means that they kind of have to wind up in the lucrative viper pit of Silicon Valley at some point, right? If Industry wants to keep extrapolating in the way it has, moving from one bank’s trading floor out into the arenas of world power, it makes sense to visit the accelerationists in their natural habitat. “Maybe save talking about abolishing democracy for your dinners in Silicon Valley,” Yasmin says to Stefanowicz in “Both, And.” Industry has featured a lot of cursed meals in its day, so why not cap things off with some Californian excellence: a bounty of fresh dishes served cold. I can see it now: a little bit Mountainhead, a few VC cameos, an off-putting billionaire saying, “And now for the dessert course”—et voila, in walks Rob Spearing to serve hallucinogens to the guests on a silver platter. 

But then there’s also L.A., which, the more I think about it, feels more right for Industry. Maybe Sweetpea discusses her book with the bros at TBPN live in studio. Maybe Yasmin seeks to add Hollywood assets to the Norton family of media enterprises or to find more girls for her side hustle. (Maybe Hayley, a.k.a. “Calabasas,” shows her around Calabasas!) Maybe Al-Miraj is a proud L.A. 2028 Olympics sponsor. And now that I’ve totally talked myself into unleashing TV’s biggest sinners into the City of Angels, here’s the content I least hope to see: anything set in D.C. If you’re going to spend time on politicians, at least have them be out in California, trying to raise money. (I priced New York low on this list because the show has already been there, albeit briefly. But it’s probably your best-value bet, and it gives us the best chance at finding out the latest with DVD.) 

Yasmin will have a baby: 41¢

In “Both, And,” Yasmin tells Harper that she’s sober these days—“not in an annoying way; I just enjoy the clarity.” While I took this to be an echo of Whitney’s MO to get other people hammered while observantly orchestrating his little schemes, other viewers felt that it was an indication that Yasmin is with child. (Especially after she broke up with Henry and Henry broke down about the children he imagined they’d have.) Now, some fine print here: If Harper were to act as an ersatz doula to Yasmin one day, both this market and the “Harper and Yasmin will forge an uneasy alliance” one above would resolve to YES.

Sam Altman will be name-dropped: 60¢

Dario Amodei will have a cameo: 40¢

Please be the latter, please be the latter … we don’t need to encourage Altman further.

There will be an episode constructed solely of deleted scenes: 5¢

I don’t think I’ve ever known more about what wasn’t in a show than I know about Industry. You can’t throw a lucite deal toy without hitting an interview in which the creators or actors talk about some unseen scene or another. Just off the top of my head, we’ve learned that Industry’s cutting-room floor contains a part when we meet Whitney Halberstram’s parents (!) and a sequence involving Whitney and a stranger at a Lithuanian bar. After Eric’s departure in Season 4’s “Dear Henry,” the actor Ken Leung revealed that he’d filmed a whole sequence involving his wife, daughter, and a nose ring that culminated in a long walk to go get cigarettes. (We also learned that there’s footage out there of Eric breaking down after quitting SternTao and of Eric being haunted by Bill Adler’s ghost. This is what they took from us!!) Anyway, if Industry needs to save money somewhere to afford a trip to America, the showrunners could probably sew together a free episode out of all the scenes they’ve already shot.

The following characters will return in more than one episode:

Jesse Bloom: 67¢

Eric Tao: 51¢

Hayley Clay: 51¢

Henry Muck: 49¢

Robert Spearing: 19¢

Whitney Halberstram: 18¢

I added the more than one episode stipulation here to avoid a “Did Cardi B perform at the Super Bowl?” situation because the goal of this prediction market is to determine whether certain characters will be part of the plot in a meaningful way, not to parse whether we’ll be getting, like, another single-frame shot of Whitney in Lithuania or an Anraj-spotted-in-the-back-of-a-room redux. (Not that I didn’t love spotting Anraj, to be clear.) Basically, the line here is Season 4 Kenny. 

Leading the pack in my mind is Jesse Bloom. Yes, it’s partly wishful thinking, but also: He’s out of jail now; he’s been name-dropped in Seasons 3 and 4; he had one of my favorite dynamics with Harper on the whole show; and it’s easy to imagine him teaming up with Harper, seeking revenge on Harper, or both. Plus, I feel that if he does appear on the show, it would be for at least several episodes, whereas some of these other folks listed could make sense as just one-and-done.

Will Hayley remain a key character? Will Eric and Harper reunite, or will his presence be more akin to And Just Like That’s inclusion of Samantha Jones? Either feels like a toss-up, but others are trickier to predict: Take Robert Spearing, for example. Do we miss him? Every day. Might he be brought back for some sort of closure? For sure. Would I absolutely love it if he has the most American-ass girlfriend possible, someone who has never heard the Hanani or Norton names and upon meeting Yasmin says, like, “OMG, you have the cutest accent!” Obv!! But as hard as it was at the time, Rob’s Season 3 wrap-up made for one of the finest resolutions of a character arc. I could see everyone involved wanting to preserve that. And I won’t be upset to be wrong. 

Sweetpea will out-Harper Harper, including but not limited to being poached by a competitor: 59¢

She learned it by watching you!! (May that competitor please be Jesse Bloom.) 

There will be a crossover episode that pierces the veil between Industry and the Taylor Sheridan universe: 26¢

Look, we’re in uncharted territory with this Paramount-Warner merger. There’s no telling what kinds of moves the son of this man is capable of! Some might worry that the new brass could neuter any suggested Industry plots that are too critical of the current U.S. administration or the broader right-wing cabal. Me? I’m busy daydreaming about Angela Norris (Ali Larter) from Landman butting heads with Yasmin (God help them both) or about Rob sitting in a Montana hot spring pitching psilocybin to Rip Wheeler. 

The season will begin (or end) with new grad interviews: 78¢

I know, I know, the Industry creators told GQ that they feel they have no choice but to keep going bigger with Season 5 rather than getting smaller. Which is why the most radical thing they could do would be to end the series with a new beginning: bring it back to a fresh set of grads just starting out somewhere, London or otherwise, big bank or other. 

Maybe it’s a bunch of Americans going through the Jane Street gauntlet. Or remember when Rishi denigrated that dude he was selling drugs to by saying he probably worked at “a povo dive like Royal Bank of Scotland”? Why not make Season 5 about the life and times (and weird kinks) of whoever works there? Alternatively, there’s always the cutthroat law school students angling for big judicial clerkships … or the proud dropout types pitching themselves to Peter Thiel. 

Or you could really go full circle and have a new class of strivers all interviewing to work at one of London’s premier hedge funds. And there, on the other side of the table, sits a serene Harper Stern, exactly the way it should be.