Reed Hastings on Life After Netflix: Ski Resorts, AI Disruption, and Letting Go

Two months after stepping down as Netflix chairman, Reed Hastings is candid about the emotional texture of walking away from a company he co-founded 29 years ago. He admits to occasional pangs of nostalgia — wanting to be in the room when big calls get made — but insists the real psychological rupture came in January 2023, when he stepped back from co-CEO duties, slashing his workweek from 70 hours to roughly one. By the time he exited the board entirely, the transition felt anticlimactic.

Hastings was notably uninvolved in some of Netflix's most consequential recent decisions. When the company walked away from an $83 billion proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery's studio and streaming assets earlier this year, he says he wasn't on the call. Co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos concluded they couldn't justify topping the price Paramount Skydance had offered. That detachment reflects a deliberate philosophy: his successors should ask themselves what Hastings might think, then set that aside and make their own call. He chose the co-CEO model after weighing alternatives — a single successor, an outside hire, or staying himself — and credits the COVID-19 pandemic with proving that Peters and Sarandos could handle ambiguity. He's blunt that Netflix will probably run better without him.

Hastings has channeled his post-Netflix energy into what he calls a new life rather than a second act. He sits on the board of AI company Anthropic, has given over $1 billion to education philanthropy, and has become CEO of Powder Mountain, a ski resort in Eden, Utah, that was losing money when he took it over. His ambition there is to build a private luxury enclave — Powder Haven — spanning nearly the area of Manhattan, capped at 650 member families with access to a 70,000-square-foot clubhouse and 3,000 acres of private terrain. The model is deliberately anti-scale, positioned against the mass-market Epic and Ikon multi-resort passes. He compares those giants to Costco and positions Powder Haven as the boutique alternative. The resort hasn't turned a profit yet, but Hastings is explicit that he also hopes to make serious money from it.

The project isn't without friction. Some existing season pass holders have pushed back against the exclusive private development, and Hastings acknowledges the tension is real but calls it inevitable. He argues the mountain was financially distressed and heading for change regardless, and stresses he's invested in the public ski area too — new lifts, new lodges — while protecting it from being overrun by multi-mountain pass holders.

On AI, Hastings is sweeping in his predictions. He argues the technology has been doubling in capability roughly every year for the past decade, meaning it could be 32 times more effective within five years. He frames this as equivalent to doubling a company's workforce annually — presenting executives with a stark choice between cutting headcount and holding position, or deploying new AI capacity aggressively against competitors. The CEO's job, he says, is disciplined scenario planning, not paranoia: obsessing over comets hitting the earth wastes attention that should go toward probable disruptions. What's coming, he argues, is a great wave of creative destruction — one that could render today's incumbents as obsolete as Blockbuster Video, while faster movers build the next Netflix-scale disruptors.