The empire is falling apart. Subordinates insult each other in the open. Take-away boxes are scattered around the trading floor. Pierpoint, the 150-year-old financial giant at the heart of HBO industrycollapses into bankruptcy after a series of disastrous investments. It’s like 2008 all over again, only this time the government isn’t saving them. Sleeplessly, the bank’s leaders locked themselves in a conference room to work out a rescue plan. Tom Woolsey, Pierpoint’s young Yale-educated CEO, spots an intruder: “Who the hell is that?” It’s Eric Tao (Ken Leung), a grizzled elder statesman, institutional loyalist and, at this moment, an Asian-American outsider at a table with distinguished white men.

In the first season, Eric was introduced as the top dog at Pierpoint, a predator who prowls the trading floor. Subsequent episodes have explored the naked underbelly of his wild personality. Now, at the end of the third season, he is exposed industryis the most contradictory and fascinating character. He is the son of a factory worker chasing the American dream in a classist United Kingdom, a racist novelty in a company founded by slave owners but also “the face of the status quo.” He is a neglectful girl dad and an overbearing corporate dad, bully and victim, alpha male and cheater. And in the end, after 30 years of service, he is fired.

As general manager of the Cross Product Sales (CPS) team, Eric ruled through intimidation and tough love industryHe schemes with young employees and defrauds the billionaire clients he protected as his own. His status as one of the bank’s top money earners gave him the freedom to be foul-mouthed and toxically macho. He didn’t follow the office dress code, leaving his collared shirts unbuttoned and rarely wearing a tie; He gave instructions in his boxers, prompting his team to justify the slow trickle of the streams. “Does he always change on the ground?” asked one of his subordinates in the second season. “It’s an MD Power thing,” replied another.

But Eric also looked for at-risk talent with something to prove. It was he who took a chance on public college dropout Harper Stern and saw in her a kindred spirit – a capitalist believer from the States who didn’t grow up as a mixed-race woman raised by an abusive single mother Benefits of Privilege. “People like us, born at the bottom, where would you take our chance to make it to the top fifth – it’s intimidating,” he told her. Eric is a stubborn Chinese-American whose father worked on an assembly line making equipment for 50 years. His parents likely immigrated before Hart-Celler, meaning that Eric, now in his 50s, had to learn how to climb the American social and economic hierarchy on his own – unlike some of today’s young, wealthy, second-generation people, who have defined: “Asian American” in their own image, with highly educated parents who came with H-1B visas, elite degrees, and enough collective consciousness to proclaim the “bamboo ceiling.” We learn Eric’s government name when he is finally promoted to partner in season three; His parents believed so much in the promise of their new country that they named him Alvin America Tao.

Photo: Simon Ridgway

Eric started at Pierpoint as a shaky employee. At his very first client dinner at Nobu with a British hedge fund manager, he vomited on the table due to gastroenteritis. He had a problematic mentor of his own, a white man named Newman, who mistreated him while teaching him the rules of the trade. “I heard him compliment me once: ‘This little guy is a natural salesman,'” he informs Harper in the first season. Later, after Newman dies, Eric dines with his widow Holly at a Chinese restaurant in New York that they used to frequent as business partners. After the owner alludes to the climate of anti-Asian hostility in the United States, Eric tells her a Chris Rock joke: “Being a minority in America is like the uncle who paid for your college but harassed you.”

However, at times Eric seems to have overcome his minority status and exhibits his own predatory behavior. He has learned the mysterious codes of old money – for example, that it is gauche to ask “how many” when hunting pheasants in the country, and what rules you have to break to gain respect. That’s no easy task in a social environment where showing hunger is declassified and ruled by blue-blooded Oxford graduates who turn their noses up at working-class kids with affordable suits and no work-life balance. Eric enjoys the trappings and impunity of the ruler that he is, trampling on the wishes of his deputy Daria and raging against Harper in a locked conference room. He was fired for the latter offense, but then rehired because he was simply too valuable to the company. He is married to a white woman, Candice, a high-level tech executive whom he openly refers to as C– at the office Christmas party. After she divorces him, he forgets to coordinate childcare for his children and leaves them to Pierpoint’s young female employees.

“In the UK we talk about social mobility, the erosion of class distinctions,” said Konrad Kay, who came up with the idea along with Mickey Down Industry — Vulture said. “But Mickey and I think it’s more firmly established than ever.” The series also illustrates the stubbornness of racial hierarchies, which the Asian characters in particular find difficult to overcome. Eric slides into management as the docile deputy to Bill Adler, whose career Eric began when he hired him years ago. “I’m sure it’s not lost on you how late this partnership has come in your career. I campaigned hard for it,” says Bill after Eric’s promotion to partner – before suggesting that the promotion was intended to promote diversity. “I said look around the room, it’s a bit monochromatic, right.”

After the divorce, Eric pursues a series of younger white women—his employee’s lawyer Yasmin, an escort, and finally Yasmin himself—to assert his own masculinity, a classic impulse among Asian men who feel emasculated by the culture. But Eric is no Newman and his masculine authority isn’t enough to convince his subordinates to screw him over. He manages to sleep with Newman’s widow, who Eric dated before she moved on to be his boss. But not before she glosses over the revelation of her Trump-supporting husband’s racism with some weak liberal platitudes: “In 28 years of marriage, I’ve never heard him speak like that – I’m sorry, that’s not who he was.”

Pierpoint CFO Wilhelmina Fassbinder (Georgina Rich) with Eric Tao (Ken Leung).
Photo: Simon Ridgway

Eric becomes increasingly weaker, more pathetic and more desperate as the show progresses. His initial habit of swinging a bat on the trading floor seems like the panicked defense of someone who knows he is vulnerable. He is allergic to any sign of weakness and instructs a traumatized co-worker, Robert, to shout, “I am a man and I am relentless” after the death of Robert’s customer and lover. But the mantra rings hollow, especially when Eric shouts it after hastily firing a director in the middle of a crucial IPO. His masculinity crisis is rivaled only by that of Rishi, another asshole who targets younger female colleagues and can’t escape the reality that the white people whose community he’s become involved in will never see him as one of them . Rishi, who is also Asian, is hit on by an Arab nepo baby, Ali, who is put on the CPS desk because his parents are investors. “Habibi, by the way, you would clean my house at home,” Ali mocks.

It is Eric and Rishi who suffer the most tragic fates at the end of the third season. Rishi’s downfall is his chauvinism; Eric’s faith is in a capitalist institution that always saw him as disposable. “To him, you’re a useful idiot,” says Wilhelmina Fassbinder, CFO of Pierpoint, to Eric von Adler, which prompts him to betray his friend by using his cancer diagnosis against him in the boardroom. After staunchly opposing anything that would jeopardize the Pierpoint brand, Eric calls Ali and brokers a takeover by the Saudi-backed Al-Mi’raj. He is sent as a sacrificial messenger to quell the bank’s hostile base and then tells his origin story as the child of immigrants. “Money is peace,” he says, not wisdom from his father, but nonsense from a Denis Johnson novel. Nevertheless, Eric only receives a “thumbs up” text message from Woolsey; Shortly afterwards he is released. The last employee Eric encounters on the way out of Pierpoint’s office is an older Asian-American janitor. “Goodbye, Peter,” Eric says, asking for the solidarity of a brother whose contributions have also been overlooked. But the farewell he receives is impersonal, matter-of-fact: “Good-bye, sir.”