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

Two months after stepping down as Netflix chairman, Reed Hastings describes his departure from the $325 billion company he co-founded 29 years ago as largely drama-free — at least compared to January 2023, when he actually stopped being co-CEO and went from 70-hour workweeks to just one. He admits to occasional 'tinges' of nostalgia but says he has deliberately avoided backseat-driving his successors, co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos. When Netflix walked away from an $83 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery's studio and streaming assets in February — ultimately unable to outbid Paramount Skydance — Hastings says he wasn't even in the room.

The co-CEO succession structure, which Hastings engineered gradually over several years, was stress-tested during the COVID-19 pandemic and ultimately convinced him that Peters and Sarandos could not only run Netflix without him, but probably run it better. He's candid that the model won't work everywhere: it requires two people who trust each other and love the organization more than their own advancement, which he calls 'a rare set of personalities.' He dismisses studies showing co-CEO companies slightly outperform peers as mostly a signaling effect — the kind of bold move that only confident companies make.

Hastings has channeled his post-Netflix energy into what he calls 'a new life' rather than a second act. He's on the board of AI lab Anthropic, has given over $1 billion to education philanthropy, and has returned to the CEO role — this time running Powder Mountain, a ski resort in Eden, Utah. The mountain was in debt and losing money when he took it over. He has since invested an undisclosed sum to build Powder Haven, a private luxury development covering nearly the area of Manhattan, limited to just 650 families, with a 70,000-square-foot clubhouse and 3,000 acres of uncrowded wilderness. He sees it as the opposite of the Epic and Ikon multi-resort passes — 'Think of them like Costco,' he says — positioning Powder Mountain as hyper-boutique and uncompromising. He acknowledges tensions with local season pass holders who can't afford Powder Haven membership, calling the pushback 'inevitable.'

On artificial intelligence, Hastings — who holds a master's degree in the subject — is blunt about the scale of disruption ahead. He argues AI has roughly doubled in capability every year for the past decade, meaning it could be 32 times more effective within five years. For CEOs, that's equivalent to doubling your workforce annually: companies can either shrink headcount and hold position, or deploy those gains offensively against competitors. His advice is to think like a chess grandmaster — focused on high-probability scenarios rather than paranoid about tail risks like comets. What's coming, he argues, is creative destruction on the scale of what Netflix inflicted on Blockbuster, and companies that move too slowly may face the same fate.