Reed Hastings, co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, has gone into semi-retirement — and he now spends much of his time attending to the Utah ski resort he bought in 2023.
But he continues to serve on Netflix’s board as chairman of Netflix, and in a new interview, the exec spoke about the biggest risk facing Netflix: if AI-generated free content on platforms like YouTube becomes compelling enough to drive people to stop paying for Netflix.
In an interview with syndicated TV show “In Depth With Graham Bensinger,” Hastings said that he is “very confident” about the future of subscription entertainment. But he said Netflix has “a couple” of risks, mostly involving AI. He put it this way: “Does AI transform content creation in ways such that young people only watch YouTube, and YouTube content boosted with AI becomes cool and sexy enough that that takes all their time.”
Hastings said that Netflix has to “use AI well enough to improve our content, along with all the talent that we work with, so that we’re worth paying for. So YouTube’s free, and we’re a subscription, and so we have to justify, which has been the history of television, starting with HBO: Why pay for television? That was the initial thing. And HBO proved that they could do content good enough that it was worth paying for. And so the challenge for us is to use AI to improve the storytelling.”
Hastings, who stepped down as CEO of Netflix in early 2023 after leading the company for 25 years, is majority owner of Utah’s Powder Mountain ski resort. He bought the place in a 2023 deal for undisclosed terms under which he assumed the resort’s $100 million-plus in debt, per the New York Times.
About leaving as CEO, Hastings said, “So imagine you’re in a 25-year marriage, like I was with Netflix, and then suddenly you’re cast out. You’re free.”
About taking over Powder Mountain, he said, “this was sort of my rebound business.”
“This opportunity came and this was like somebody to love me, and it was like I could run something and take it over,” Hastings said about buying the ski resort. “I loved this place and, and love it still. So it was [that] I could do something impactful that I cared about, something totally different than Netflix — very visceral, working on everything from menus to lifts to design of different buildings to creating a community, compared to a high scale internet business.”
Also in the interview, Hastings said that after he stepped aside as CEO of Netflix, he cut his alcohol intake from three glasses a day down to one. He said he was self-medicating to deal with the stress of running the company.
“When I was working, I was stress eating and stress drinking,” Hastings told Bensinger. “When you’re self-medicating like that, you don’t know what would it be without it.”
Watch clips from episode of “In Depth With Graham Bensinger” featuring Hastings, scheduled to air across the U.S. in broadcast syndication on March 28:
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