Reed Hastings: Netflix’s co-founder and media disruptor

11:21Zing Tsjeng:Hopefully you've rewound it because it says, be kind, please rewind.

11:24Simon Jack:So in a sense, it's almost like a library. Exactly. OK. It's like, you've got it. I think everyone knows the concept of a library.

11:32Zing Tsjeng:Anyway, all right. With that little blast from the past, let's carry on.

11:36Simon Jack:Well, this market, well, this market for VHS rental was completely dominated by a company called Blockbuster. and that was a multi-billion dollar company that had over 6 ,000 stores worldwide. So clearly the whole film TV rental space is a really lucrative bit to get into. But how do you compete with a Goliath-like blockbuster?

11:56Zing Tsjeng:Well, Reid's idea was fully fleshed out with Netflix co-founder Mark Randolph. Mark had been head of marketing at Pure Atria. They'd worked together before. They often commuted together to the office and they spent their time trying to come up with big new e-commerce ideas. Now, e-commerce was a hot new thing every entrepreneur wanted in on. And Reid described himself as someone who likes to solve crossword puzzles. And this is how he viewed video rental, saying it almost doesn't matter what the domain or the market is. It's mostly a puzzle to figure out. So we're not talking about a cinephile here.

12:28Zing Tsjeng:He's not some great movie buff. He's not Steven Spielberg. Reid, at heart, is a tech entrepreneur trying to solve a problem.

12:36Simon Jack:So Netflix would be an e-commerce video rental company. Videos were sent and then they were returned in the mail. So there was one big issue with this. VHS cassettes are really heavy. They cost about$4 to ship and there's no way customers would pay an$8 return shipping fee on top of the rental fee. But fortunately, there was also a new technology that was about to emerge to solve this problem. A mutual friend of theirs tipped them off about this new thing called DVDs. Now, I remember these. So to be sure, DVDs could travel in the mail because they are smaller. They're kind of CD sized. Reid bought some CDs because he couldn't yet buy DVDs and mailed them to himself.

13:14Simon Jack:And when they arrived intact in an envelope, he was like, OK, let's go.

13:18Zing Tsjeng:OK, light bulb moment. So he invested$2 million and got a few other investors, including Mark's mum, who gave him$25 ,000. And Netflix.com launched in 1998 with about 800 titles in its inventory, in its library. But they were too early. DVD players had only just hit stores in the US. They were expensive at around$700. Only 1 % of US households actually owned one. So the success of Netflix was dependent on this new technology taking off. And remember, many other technologies had failed, like Laserdisc, like Betamax, whatever. It wasn't a slam dunk that DVDs were going to work.

13:55Simon Jack:But what Netflix did have was an infrastructure. And so later that year, one of our other billionaires, Jeff Bezos, came knocking. Now, at this point, Amazon was only four years old. It recently gone public. Bezos had just become a billionaire and he was actively diversifying Amazon beyond just being a bookshop. Right. And he saw Netflix as a really quick route into video. According to Mark, they were being offered something like 15 million dollars. Netflix wasn't yet profitable, but they knew they were on the brink of something. So as Reid said, we said no and then worked our ass off for 20 years.

14:28Zing Tsjeng:Yes, if Jeff Bezos comes knocking from Amazon, you know you're on to something. If you've got his attention, and you know he's probably going to try and lowball you with an offer. So anyway, the next problem they had to solve, though, was a lack of repeat business. People would rent four or five times and then just stop using it. So in 1999, Reid introduced the subscription model. For a set fee every month, customers could get unlimited DVDs. DVDs. When they returned the DVD, Netflix automatically sent them the next one from their list. Suddenly, customer attention shot up. This new model worked.

15:02Simon Jack:And actually, interestingly, that's the model that Netflix is built on for streaming, right? You pay a subscription fee, you get as much as you want.

15:08Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, exactly.

15:09Simon Jack:Well, at the very start of the new millennium, Reed secured$30 million in a major growth financing round, which was led by yet another of our billionaires, Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH. Now, this cash injection was very much needed because Netflix was burning through money as they grew their DVD by mail logistics system. So this investment came just in the nick of time. In March 2000, the dot-com bubble burst and no one could get any investment.

15:33Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, I remember that happening very well. Reid knew that he wasn't going to be able to raise any more money for any time soon, but it was costing them to get new customers through marketing. It was costing them to buy new DVDs. It was costing them to package the shipments. Plus, they have to pay the staff, of course. Netflix had 300 ,000 subscribers at that time, but they were on track to lose tens of millions of dollars. So he turned down Amazon, but now Reid was looking for a new alliance. It was time to meet the Goliath in their market.

16:03Simon Jack:Reid, Mark and their CFO took a private jet to Dallas to put in an offer to Blockbuster. Reid made his pitch that Blockbuster should buy 49 % of Netflix for 50 million and he'd run the online service under blockbuster.com. According to Mark, Blockbuster's CEOs struggled not to laugh at their offer. The company just were not interested. They were over 100 times larger than Netflix, and the dot-com bubble bursting meant that they were highly sceptical of any future in digital media. Reid was crestfallen. He said, That night when I got into bed and closed my eyes, I had this image of all 60 ,000 Blockbuster employees erupting in laughter at the ridiculousness of our proposal.

16:43Simon Jack:Ouch. Why would a powerhouse like Blockbuster be interested in a flailing wannabe like Netflix?

16:50Zing Tsjeng:Oh, this guy's always got a movie script written into it himself, hasn't he?

16:54Simon Jack:He's writing that line in his head as we speak.

16:56Zing Tsjeng:Well, so Netflix was going to have to go on their own as the rental underdog. But fortunately, DVDs were now exploding in popularity. DVD players had got much cheaper. People preferred them. They were higher quality. There were bonus features on those DVDs. The studios liked them because they were cheaper to manufacture. So there's wind behind DVDs. So Reed opened regional warehouses across the US, which meant customers could get overnight delivery.

17:21Simon Jack:Netflix had also been focusing on personalisation by building a recommendation engine. Now, at this point, using algorithms in this way was really innovative. And remember, Reed's Masters was an AI. And by 2002, Netflix had around 600 ,000 subscribers and 70 % of the movies that customers rented were recommended to them on the site. And that's something that still continues to this day. This was helpful for the business. It decreased demand for popular new releases which cost more for Netflix to buy from the film studios.

17:51Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. Well, so this was a period of fast growth, which meant he needed money. So Reid took Netflix public when you sell shares to the public to raise extra cash. And he raised just under$100 million. And Reid said he took it public because that's what companies did. We didn't question it. In hindsight, I tell other entrepreneurs, don't be in a hurry to go public because it gives your competitors, this is interesting, a lot of information. That was the moment Blockbuster said, we should go competing and that's interesting one of the reasons companies stay private for longer is a there's much more money available which you can raise privately and b when you go public and sell shares to the public you have to basically print out a prospectus which gives a lot of information about the company some of which you know might be helpful to competitors so but blockbuster they had been pretty short-sighted about digital it took them it took them until 2004 to launch their own online subscription service.

18:45Zing Tsjeng:They were slow to respond and Reid himself said if they had launched two years earlier, they would have killed us.

18:51Simon Jack:Over the next few years, Netflix spent aggressively on marketing. They created strong branding. There was a distinctive red envelope for those DVDs. I bet those are collectibles now. There were TV ads, one of which featured Polly from The Sopranos and a travelling roadshow with screenings of famous movies in the places that they were set. So they screened Jaws in Martha's Vineyard, for instance. And by the end of 2006, this all seemed to be working. Netflix had 6.3 million subscribers.

19:18Zing Tsjeng:And personally, in an interesting move for the chief exec of a rapidly growing company, it was around this period, the early 2000s, that Reid moved his wife and their two children to Rome for a year just because they wanted to. He commuted to Silicon Valley two weeks each month. And Reid's talent seems to be recognising the direction of travel in his industry. He said DVDs will continue to generate big profits in the near future. Netflix has at least another decade of dominance ahead of it. But movies over the internet are coming and at some point it will become big business. How right was he?

19:50Zing Tsjeng:For Reed, streaming over the internet into customers' home had always been the plan, but the technology just hadn't been available yet.

19:56Simon Jack:Well, it was all about to change. In 2007, with higher speed broadband becoming available in the US, streaming on personal computers became possible. And so Netflix got into streaming and quality was low to start with. There were only about a thousand movies available compared to the 70 ,000 titles customers could rent on DVD. And it was difficult at first for Netflix to gain access to recent films. Studios had exclusive long-term deals to sell them to TV channels like HBO.

20:25Zing Tsjeng:But fortunately, Reid had hired a guy called Ted Sarandos as chief content officer quite early on and he, Ted, had strong ties with the studios. He made a deal with US TV channel Starz, for example, to stream the movies they had acquired at$30 million annually for four years, which the industry called a bit of a steal. And Ted said it was three times his budget, but it did give Netflix popular new releases, including Ratatouille and Superbad.

20:51Simon Jack:And there was hype growing around Netflix, but many media executives were still in denial about the threat it posed to the industry. Jeffrey Butes, the then CEO of Time Warner, who owned HBO and Warner Brothers, told the New York Times, and this is a quote that is probably going to come back to haunt him, if not already. It's a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don't think so. Oh, that has aged badly, hasn't it? Well, Reid said the comment was a badge of honour and he even wore Albanian army dog tags around his neck for a year, saying, it was my rosary beads of motivation.

21:25Zing Tsjeng:Now as his company grew, Reid set about defining the company's culture and this was not without controversy. In 2009 he published an infamous 125 slide internal presentation called the Netflix Culture Deck which he co-authored with Netflix's chief talent officer Patty McCord, a close friend who he drove to work with every day and socialise with at the weekends. Now, Reid argued that Netflix should operate like a professional sports team, keeping only top performers, stating adequate performance gets a generous severance package. In other words, you're sacked. Brutal. It's interesting, this culture, I think, is quite important in companies.

22:05Zing Tsjeng:And there are some companies which have a rule to basically sack the 10 percent lowest performing members of the workforce every year.

22:15Simon Jack:Do you know when you're in the bottom 10 %?

22:18Zing Tsjeng:I think you do by the end.

22:20Simon Jack:Surely by the end. But at the midpoint, you want to know you've got room to improve.

22:24Zing Tsjeng:You'd hope they would have some kind of appraisal process where they would just say, listen, you're in the drop zone, so buck your ideas up.

22:30Simon Jack:I mean, it sounds a lot like Squid Game.

22:31Zing Tsjeng:Some people say, oh, we're one big happy family. We socialise together. We socialise together. We have barbecues together. So his brutality in a way, his professional sports team, if you're not playing well, you're dropped, was a little bit counter to the culture of like, we're one big happy family. And it became one of the most influential management documents in Silicon Valley.

22:53Simon Jack:I bet there are some LinkedIn executives right now who are talking about the 125 slide Netflix presentation.

23:00Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. But going back to our David versus Goliath, Netflix versus Blockbuster, well, there's only one winner.

23:08Simon Jack:Yeah. Well, by 2010, Reid had defeated Goliath because Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Now, the company had been losing money steadily. You know, it relied on physical stores, which were expensive, and was far too slow to adapt to this changing digital market. And store after store closed until finally the whole business shuttered. Although today, a single blockbuster store does still exist in the world, in Oregon, USA. And I think it's become a bit of a pilgrimage stop now.

23:35Zing Tsjeng:I bet there's all sorts of people outside with that taking selfies outside that store. Anyway, Reid's riding pretty high. The Albanian dog tags have definitely worked. But he's about to show he has feet of clay sometimes too. He's about to make a series of public missteps. First, a 60 % price increase in one go for subscriptions from$9.99 to$15.98. Second mistake, he announced in a surprise email that Netflix was splitting in two. A new company, Quickster, would take over the old DVD rental business. Customers hated the idea of having two different websites and two different charges. They also hated the fact that they were 60 % increase with subscriptions.

24:16Zing Tsjeng:And within months, Netflix was down 800 ,000 subscribers, nearly a million. So he's lost nearly a million customers and he had to reverse the split.

24:24Simon Jack:Well, Reid had pushed hard because, in his words, I was so obsessed with not getting trapped by DVDs, the way AOL got trapped, the way Kodak did, the way Blockbuster did. we would say every business we could think of died because they were too cautious. But the stock market reacted badly. Netflix's market value fell from 75 % from 16 to$4 billion in months. Yeah. And Reid went from Fortune magazine's business person of the year to the butt of the joke on Saturday Night Live. Talk about a fall from grace. Reid said everything we'd built was crashing down because of my bad decision. It was the lowest point in my career.

25:00Zing Tsjeng:But despite these missteps, Netflix was still at the forefront of a big shift in the industry, and that is streaming, and major Hollywood studios were beginning to recognise the scale of its growing power. One by one, Netflix signed deals with the big studios, even enticing DreamWorks to end its TV deal with HBO. Their biggest coup came when Netflix beat traditional TV networks to secure exclusive rights to stream Disney's new movies, including blockbuster releases from Pixar and Marvel. The deal reportedly cost them around$300 million a year.

25:32Simon Jack:And eventually they lost the rights because Disney went off and set up its own streaming platform. Well, Netflix was no longer just focusing on film. It needed hours and hours of content to keep viewers streaming. So they started buying TV shows. And far from cannibalising those TV audiences, Netflix often expanded them. So viewers would discover a show through the back catalogue on Netflix. And then they would tune in on traditional television to watch when the new series would air.

25:56Zing Tsjeng:But buying its competitors' content was expensive, so they got into original programming. In 2013, they released the political drama House of Cards. Everything about this seemed fresh. You had an Oscar-winning film starring Kevin Spacey in a time when film actors wouldn't usually dream of appearing on TV. TV was very much the poor relation to film at that point. Boy, that's changed.

26:19Simon Jack:And in a move that stunned Hollywood, Netflix committed roughly$100 million for two seasons of House of Cards before a single episode had ever been filmed. Wow, I bet there were a lot of panicked meetings in LA about this. Because this is the opposite of the traditional TV model. Because executives will test a pilot, they'll monitor the ratings closely. If audiences don't tune in, they will just pull the plug if the show fails to find that audience. And the question is, why did Netflix have such faith in House of Cards? The algorithm. So they'd applied this algorithm to the original BBC series House of Cards, which the Kevin Spacey show is based on.

26:57Simon Jack:The West Wing, another show about the White House and movies featuring Kevin Spacey. So crunching all these numbers and data points, the company was convinced House of Cards was going to be popular.

27:08Zing Tsjeng:And they were right. Netflix released all 13 episodes of the first season globally all at once and introduced the concept, to which I'm very familiar, of binge watching. We're totally used to it now, but it was a pretty radical departure from the traditional weekly television schedule. Now, traditional TV or commercial TV is paid for by adverts. The BBC is slightly different. It's paid for by a licence fee. Advertisers pay more for the prime time slots where more people are watching, like between seven and nine o 'clock. And so shows had to be released over the course of weeks so that everyone was watching at those prime times.

27:45Simon Jack:And this release schedule actually changes and shapes the content itself because episodes have to be a certain length. They have to fit the rhythm of adverts and the number of them. They have to have a cliffhanger to keep viewers coming back week after week. But Netflix has a different model. It doesn't need advertisers, right? Because their model is based on subscriptions. And so they're freed from the shackles of the TV schedule. So Netflix shows can be radically different. They can be different lengths to fit the story. They don't necessarily need to have cliffhangers in the same way. If viewers were choosing to binge watch episode after episode, a lot of showrunners felt like they could be more sophisticated.

28:22Simon Jack:You know, they didn't have to do, for instance, recaps.

28:24Zing Tsjeng:Yeah, and it did change TV, didn't it? I mean, it has changed content for sure, all of that stuff. I mean, TV just looks and feels different than it did before Netflix and the others came along. Reid said, no one's ever done it like this before. Or consumers can watch it when they want, how they want. And listen, it worked. House of Cards won three Emmys. They folded it up with two more original programmes that year. Orange is the New Black. They revived Arrested Development, which had been dropped by Fox years earlier. So having a string of hits.

28:52Simon Jack:By the end of 2013, Netflix had made net profits of$112 million. And they had nearly 50 million subscribers in over 40 countries. The stock market reacted very well to this. Netflix shares surged over 300 % and investors saw Netflix as the future of television. Now, all this meant that in 2014, Forbes announced that Reed had become a billionaire. Over 900 million of his net worth was in Netflix stocking options, plus his other assets, which included about 120 million in post-tax profits from stock sales over the last five years. So at the age of 53, Reed Hastings is officially a billionaire.

29:55We'll be right back.

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32:18Zing Tsjeng:Let us take Reid Hastings beyond a billion. Over the last decade, Netflix is now the Goliath on the block. In 2016, it announced a major international expansion into 130 new territories, making them truly global. They've also been helped by the proliferation of smartphones, smart TVs in particular, and super fast internet all around the world. and the Covid pandemic was also a big success story for Netflix. Everyone forced to stay at home, what's on telly? They added a record 36 million subscribers in 2020, the year of the pandemic. And at the start of 2021, after Netflix passed 200 million subscribers, Reid celebrated with a steak from the chain restaurant Denny's.

32:59Simon Jack:Keeping it simple, while Netflix didn't initially reveal subscriber viewership numbers for their original series, unlike traditional television, But for the third series of Stranger Things, Netflix revealed that it smashed their records with 40.7 million account holders watching the show in its first four days after release. And Squid Game smashed that record and remains the most watched show on the streamer. Netflix now measures in hours, with Squid Game getting over 1.65 billion hours within its first 28 days. That is a stupendous number, especially when you take into account how many people now watch terrestrial TV.

33:34Amazing.

33:36Zing Tsjeng:What a lot of eyeballs that is. By this point, the traditional studios and networks were entering the streaming space. So Disney had seen what had happened. Disney Plus came along, HBO Max. Netflix, though, had the first mover advantage. People tend to stick with a subscription service, but competition is pretty fierce. Amazon, Apple have got streaming services. And these are companies with extremely deep pockets, multi-trillion dollar companies. And in 2022, because the field is getting much more packed, Netflix reported its first loss, decline in subscribers since 2011.

34:09Simon Jack:To compete, Netflix are spending heavily on content, including spending a reported hundred million on a deal with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But Meghan's Lifestyle and Cookery show did not unfortunately do very well. In recent years, Netflix, however, has turned its attention back to film. And as with television, it's completely disrupted the traditional cinema model. It's done this by financing and releasing high-profile films direct to streaming, often completely bypassing traditional theatrical windows. And this has made it much harder for cinemas to secure exclusive long runs, especially for mid-budget films that once depended on box office performance.

34:47Simon Jack:Reid, however, has argued that movie theatres are strangling the movie business. There's no innovation in the movie business in the last 50 years.

34:54Zing Tsjeng:Hollywood resistance took some interesting forms. Figures like Steven Spielberg, another one of our billionaires, argued that films debuting on streaming platforms like Netflix shouldn't qualify for Oscars. Now, Netflix gets round this by sometimes having very brief, very limited cinema runs for those films so they do qualify. And by 2020, Netflix had 24 Oscar nominations, more than any other media company that year. And viewers, in a way, expect this kind of home-first viewing, and they often choose convenience and immediate access over the theatrical experience, which is sad but I must confess because I love going to the movies but there's no doubt I go less

35:33Simon Jack:yeah it's interesting I've definitely noticed among my generation there is this perception of a film you can watch on television or your laptop i.e on Netflix or another streamer and a film you simply must watch in cinemas and I think that's what filmmakers are starting to cotton on to if you look at marketing for certain films it gives a sense of like you've got to see this in a cinema You've got to go to a movie theatre. You know, the new Christopher Nolan film, you know, The Odyssey comes to mind. That is being marketed really heavily as something you simply have to see on a big screen.

36:03Zing Tsjeng:Anyway, in 2023, Netflix shipped its last DVD ending the service that began it all. And that year, age 62, Reed Hastings stood down as Netflix's chief exec to serve as the company's chairman, which is quite a normal passage to go from CEO to chairman. In his statement, Reid said it had been part of a years-long succession plan to leave day-to-day management to Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters.

36:27Simon Jack:Then, in April this year, 2026, Reid stepped down as chairman. He said, Netflix changed my life in so many ways, but he wanted to spend more time on his philanthropy. To date, he's donated over$2 billion. That is nothing to be sneezed at. He had signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's giving pledge in 2012, and he signed that before he even became a billionaire. In 2020, him and his wife Patty donated£120 million to two historically black colleges and the college fund UNCF. He's been an active philanthropist in education for decades, including serving on the board of the California Charter Schools Association.

37:03Zing Tsjeng:Quite impressive stuff. In 2024, he gave the largest single donation by any US philanthropist that year, giving away 2 million shares of Netflix, which is worth$1.1 billion, to their education-focused Hastings Fund. The gift comprised about 40 % of Reid's Netflix stock and he now owns less than 1 % of Netflix shares. He may be gone, but Netflix continues now as a dominant but mature beast, if you like. Less the disruptive upstart, more a profitable mainstream media company. And after more than 30 years together, Reid lives in Santa Cruz with Patti, who remains substantially indifferent, is the quote we have, to her husband's business success.

37:44Zing Tsjeng:I like that a lot. Ah, extra stat for you. They've got five goats and ten chickens.

37:49Simon Jack:I like the sound of patty.

37:50Zing Tsjeng:Patty sounds cool, doesn't she?

37:52Simon Jack:Yeah. Well, now it's time to ask the big question. Is Reed Hastings good, bad or just another billionaire?

37:58Zing Tsjeng:And at this point, what we like to do for a bit of fun is we score them in certain categories, from 0 to 10, in wealth, controversy, power and legacy. So the name of the game is billionaire. So we'll start with wealth. currently worth$4.7 billion makes him around the 900th richest person in the world.

38:18Simon Jack:Well, he is giving away quite a lot of it. So he might not be very rich for very much longer. He came from a well-to-do family. That's important to note. So he was born to a debutante, kind of a silver spoon in his mouth.

38:32Zing Tsjeng:But her hatred of high society seems to have rubbed off on him because he's not particularly flashy. The New York Times reported the height of his flashiness was posing on a Porsche in 1995 on the cover of USA Today. He said he put aside that kind of super fun immaturity and sold the Porsche in favour of a Toyota Avalon. And now he drives a Tesla. Wealth middling by our standards and not too much bling flashy spending.

39:00Simon Jack:No, I mean, I think he's maybe the first billionaire we've covered who has goats and chickens. Yeah, maybe.

39:07Zing Tsjeng:I would give him a three out of ten. Three out of ten, I agree. Three out on wealth. Controversy. I suppose the most controversial areas will be around the sort of company culture, the layoffs, that kind of stuff.

39:19Simon Jack:I mean, but now having seen what's going on in the tech industry, redundancies seem to be part of the culture in tech now, too. So, you know, maybe he was just ahead of the curve.

39:27Zing Tsjeng:The Netflix culture deck was appreciated by some, lauded by some. But in 2018, the Wall Street Journal spoke to more than 70 current and former Netflix employees, some of whom described an atmosphere that was ruthless, demoralising and transparent to the point of dysfunctional. Netflix pushes back on the charge that its culture is cutthroat, noting that it ranks second on Comparably's happiest employees list in October 2018, based on anonymous employee feedback.

39:57Simon Jack:Well, interestingly, during his time at Netflix, Reid also fired close friends, including the person he co-wrote the Netflix culture deck with, Patty McCord.

40:06Zing Tsjeng:Oh, he fired the person who helped write the deck about firing people.

40:09Simon Jack:Yeah, ouch. I mean, maybe he just didn't want to give her a lift to work anymore.

40:13Zing Tsjeng:Reid has said that he doesn't want anyone to feel unhappy in their job, which is why we're always clear that working at Netflix is not for everybody.

40:19Simon Jack:If you don't fit in, you get out.

40:21Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. I suppose the other controversial thing is about what Netflix has done to the industry, in particular to cinema.

40:28Simon Jack:Yeah. I mean, you know, if you speak to movie critics, some of them will argue that Netflix has completely flattened cinema. You know, there's this idea, I think, that Netflix, with the algorithm-driven entertainment that it puts out, It's just creating slop for people to binge watch, to have in the background as they're cooking dinner or doing something else or cleaning the house. That it's giving people lazy, uncreative content as opposed to cinema.

40:59Zing Tsjeng:And quite homogenous kind of content where all the shows, the production values kind of feel the same. We've already talked about its impact on the cinema model, which, you know, every now and then has a resurgence. but people just feel like there's a corrosive onward slide away from cinema and towards home watching. I would say, I'm going to say that, you know, Netflix as a thing has really changed the industry. Well, maybe that comes in legacy. Controversy, I'm going to say six.

41:28Simon Jack:Yeah, I would say six out of ten. I think depending on how you feel about Netflix depends on how you feel about the old world of cinema and television. Yes, I think that's right, yeah. You know, prestige, how much it matters to you about stuff like this. But I still think six out of ten.

41:44Zing Tsjeng:Okay, fine. Power is our next category. There's no doubt that Netflix, for the reasons we've just been discussing, was an incredibly powerful force in the industry and has changed the industry. He himself has been on the board of some pretty influential tech companies. He was on the board of Microsoft. He's on the board of Facebook for a time. he's currently on the board of Bloomberg and Anthropic which could end up being you know another mega corporation we shall see you know being a board member there means that you can't the board is there to basically represent the interests of the shareholders of that company and as such is there to basically kind of keep the chief executive from doing something stupid so So that's basically what their job is.

42:36Zing Tsjeng:And so they do wield quite a lot of power. And also with his background, he would be a particularly powerful board member. So you're not actually got the steering wheel of the company that you're a board member of. But you definitely can put a hand on the tiller and give it a little nudge left and right. So it is quite an influential position.

42:56Simon Jack:So as an individual, he probably wields quite a lot of respect and expertise. in that particular industry.

43:04Zing Tsjeng:Yeah. So Power, yeah. Let's have a think.

43:08Simon Jack:I feel like a lot of people won't know the name Reed Hastings, but if you are in Hollywood and your assistant picks up the phone and goes, Reed Hastings is on the other line, you are running to pick that up.

43:18Zing Tsjeng:You definitely are, for sure. Okay, I'm going to give Power, I would say, eight.

43:24Simon Jack:Yeah, I think I would give him an eight out of ten for Power, too.

43:29Zing Tsjeng:Legacy has changed the industry forever, hasn't it?

43:31Simon Jack:Yeah, I think it's probably changed viewing habits forever. You know, I don't think people are going to go back to a kind of everyone sitting around the television waiting for the Friday night show. I don't think that exists anymore.

43:44Zing Tsjeng:I know. We all at the binge binge watching what I'm going to do. I'm going to watch five episodes of something. You'd never do that in the past.

43:52Simon Jack:Yeah. Where your only enemy is sleep. I mean, that's a real competition is sleep. Netflix certainly popularized binge watching.

43:59Zing Tsjeng:Mind you, they've got a fight on their hands. You know, Apple of this world, Amazon's Prime Video. Disney. Disney. These are formidable competitors. So we'll see how they got on. So anyway, but when people talk about when was the moment that television and entertainment changed, people will say it was the Netflix moment.

44:19Simon Jack:Oh, and you know what? We haven't even mentioned Netflix and chill.

44:22Zing Tsjeng:What?

44:23Simon Jack:Netflix and chill. What the hell are you talking about? Basically, Netflix and chill. I don't know if anyone uses it quite as much nowadays. Is this like what you do for a date? Yes. So basically rather than, you know, the date used to be you'd get taken to the cinema, you buy some popcorn, you sit together, maybe you like hold hands or whatever. Now people Netflix and chill where you just go over to someone's house, you chill out watching Netflix.

44:45Zing Tsjeng:Why do I do this show with you? You make me feel so old.

44:48Simon Jack:Well, now you've learned.

44:51Zing Tsjeng:Okay. Legacy. Pretty high, I would say. An eight for me.

44:55Simon Jack:Yeah, I think, if anything, I think it's probably a nine out of ten.

44:59Zing Tsjeng:Okay, nine for Netflix and chill lady over there. Yes, exactly. Okay. So the final question is, is he good, bad or just another billionaire? That's up to you. What do you think? Email goodbadbillionaire, that's all one word, at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001 917 686 1176 and tell us what you think.

45:21Simon Jack:And don't forget to include your name as we may read out your message on a future episode.

45:25Zing Tsjeng:And thanks again to Thomas, who did write in and suggested Reed Hastings in the first place.

45:30Simon Jack:So we've got some listener feedback. And the first message comes from Isla, who goes, Dear Simon and Zing, Hi, my name is Isla. I'm 12 years old and I'm currently living in Barcelona. Hola. I absolutely adore your podcast. I've learned so much about business and your podcast has sparked a passion for business and mathematics. I've loved learning about many different ways of making billions I was particularly inspired by the episode on Warren Buffett I'm hoping to purchase some shares I think you might be a little bit too young for that right now Isla to see if I can make some money I was also interested in the idea of moving my money through different currencies to test if I'm able to make money out of having money like George Soros I love your show and keep up the good work Isla thank you for listening in if you are about to do any of that stuff I suggest you speak to your parents first

46:16Zing Tsjeng:although I must say I bought my first shares when I was 11 years old Is that even legal? Well I think my parents did it for me or something but I was very interested in the share prices at the back of the newspaper back in the old days I ended up in the right job I guess Yes but there's a definite potential Soros in the making there There's a natural born trader I think is going to turn out to be But thank you very much for getting in touch

46:48Zing Tsjeng:Next week we have a very special episode, an episode we recorded live at the Crossed Wires Festival.

46:54Simon Jack:It's sort of like the Woodstock or Glastonbury of podcast festivals, I would say.

46:59Zing Tsjeng:And appropriately enough for that analogy, our billionaire is a musician, Sir Paul McCartney.

47:08Zing Tsjeng:Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Elena Boateng. The editor is Paul Smith, and it's a BBC Studios production. For the BBC World Service, the senior commissioning producer is Sarah Green, and the commissioning editor is John Manel.