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Co-Founder, Chairman and Co-CEO of Netflix
Wilmot Reed Hastings is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder, chairman, and co-chief executive officer (CEO) of Netflix, ( NFLX ) and sits on a number of boards and non-profit organizations. A former member of the California State Board of Education, Hastings is an advocate for education reform through charter schools
Hastings lives in Santa Cruz, California. He is married to Patricia Ann Quillin and has two children
He appeared in a front-page article in USA Today in 1995, posing on his Porsche. He considers that immature now and has said that if he ever appears on the front page of USA Today again it will "not [be] on the hood of a Porsche, but I would [pose] with a bunch of movies".relevant Hastings sold his Porsche for a Toyota Avalon, but now drives a Tesla.
In 2018, Hastings appeared in a podcast series by Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale, and discussed the strategy adopted by Netflix to scale.
In 2020, Hastings and his wife donated $30 million to GAVI to support COVAX COVID-19 vaccines initiative.
In March 2022, Hastings donated $1 million to Razom, a Ukrainian nonprofit organization that procures emergency supplies and medical equipment such as disposable resuscitators to treat the wounded
Hastings was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father Wilmot Reed Hastings Sr. was an attorney for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration, and his mother Joan Amory Loomis was a Boston debutante from a Social Register family who was repulsed by the world of high society and taught her children to disdain it.His maternal great-grandfather was Alfred Lee Loomis.
Hastings attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door in a gap year before entering college. In 1983, he graduated from Bowdoin College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics, which he found "beautiful and engaging".
He joined the Marine Corps officer training through their Platoon Leader Class, and spent college summers in the Marines, including a stint at the Officer Candidate School boot camp at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia in the summer of 1981. He did not complete the training and never commissioned into the Marine Corps—choosing instead to pursue service in the Peace Corps “out of a combination of service and adventure”. He went to teach math at a high school of around 800 students in rural northwest Swaziland from 1983 to 1985 after college. He credits part of his entrepreneurial spirit to his time in the Peace Corps, remarking that, “Once you have hitchhiked across Africa with ten bucks in your pocket, starting a business doesn't seem too intimidating”.
After returning from the Peace Corps, Hastings went on to attend Stanford University after being rejected from his first choice MIT, graduating in 1988 with a Master's Degree in Computer Science.
