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Reed Hastings on life after Netflix and the coming ‘creative destruction’

Andrew Edgecliffe-JohnsonCEO Editor, Semafor

Updated Aug 14, 2026, 4:58am EDTAug 14, 2026, 4:58am EDT

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Two months after he stepped down as chairman of Netflix, Reed Hastings admits to getting “little tinges” of nostalgia where he still wants to be in the room as decisions are made at the company he co-founded 29 years ago. “I miss some of that, but I decided to try something totally different,” he says in an interview for The CEO Signal.<br>Hastings has resisted the temptation to play backseat driver since leaving the board. If they need to, his successors, co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos, “are able to [ask], ‘What would Reed think?’ And then they sort of put that aside and do what they think is best, which is what they should do,” he says.

Leaving the company he launched as a DVD-by-mail distributor and reinvented as a streaming pioneer that’s now worth $325 billion “hasn’t really been a big transition at all,” Hastings insists. The bigger moment was when he stopped being co-CEO in January 2023: going from 70 hours of work a week to one, “that’s the drama.”<br>Being a chairman rather than a CEO is like being a godparent versus a parent, he explains — “a pretty easy gig” — at least when things are going smoothly. Even as chair, he recalls leaving some of the company’s most consequential decisions to the two executives he’d picked to succeed him.

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When Netflix walked away from a proposed $83 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business this February, for example, “I wasn’t involved in that call,” Hastings says. Peters and Sarandos worked through the trade-offs together, before concluding that they couldn’t justify beating the price offered by Paramount Skydance.<br>The path to a co-CEO succession<br>Exiting CEOs often struggle when they find that nobody is hanging on their every word anymore. Founders can find the adjustment harder still. But Hastings sounds relaxed about walking away from the business that made him a billionaire.<br>Part of that is his comfort with the succession at the company where he remains a sizable shareholder. The staggered process, in which Hastings first made Sarandos his co-CEO, then gave Peters the same title as he stepped aside to chair the board, was one in which he became gradually more confident that the company could run without him.

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The COVID-19 pandemic proved to him that the two men could take on decisions in ambiguous and challenging circumstances, and reminded him of life’s “twists and turns,” Hastings says. He could have stayed another 10 years, as he indicated in 2020 he would do, but he concluded that he had more interesting options. “Ted and Greg were fully capable of running it. It’s not that it was going to run worse; it probably would run better.”<br>Netflix is an outlier in splitting the CEO’s responsibilities between two people, and Hastings says its board considered alternatives: “What if it’s just one of them? What if it’s an outsider? What if you don’t go?”<br>He doesn’t pretend that the co-CEO model will work at every company. “If you’ve got two people who really trust each other and who love the organization more than themselves, then you can get some real benefit because [you have] two people who can be in different places at different times,” he says. But “it’s a rare set of personalities to make it work so well.”

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Hastings puts little weight on studies that suggest that companies with such power-sharing arrangements perform slightly better than their single-CEO peers. “I think that’s mostly a signaling effect,” he says: “The companies that are really confident of their direction, they take risky steps like a dual CEO.”<br>A ‘new life’ rather than a second act<br>Hastings says risk-taking is the thread that runs through all his endeavors.<br>He is on the board of Anthropic, deepening an interest in AI that began with a master’s degree in the subject 40 years ago. He and his wife have given more than $1 billion to fund educational philanthropy, a theme close to his heart since he taught for the Peace Corps in the 1980s. And he is a CEO once more, of a ski resort in Eden, Utah, called Powder Mountain.<br>“There’s something very stimulating about big challenges where you really might fail, and then working really hard to avoid that and to hopefully have a big...