Netflix founder Reed Hastings: “Elon Musk is the bravest, most creative person on the planet.”

Reed is asked for his perspective on Elon’s acquisition of Twitter, to which he responds:

“I’m excited. Elon Musk is the bravest, most creative person on the planet. What he’s done in multiple areas is phenomenal.”

Reed says he might have take a different approach, but he emphasizes that Elon could’ve just used the $44 billion to buy a yacht:

“His style is different. Like, I’m trying to be a really steady, respectable leader, and he just doesn’t care… But he could have built a mile-long yacht for $44 billion, but it’s not good for the planet. He’s not interested… I’m 100% convinced that he is trying to help the world in all of his endeavors. And he’s trying to help the world [with X] because he believes in free speech and its power for democracy.”

He continues:

“Again, it’s not how I would do it, but I’m deeply respectful. And I’m amazed that people are so nitpicky on him. Yeah sure, the blue checkmark - he’s making a mess of some things or not. But give the guy a break. He just spent all this money to try to make it much better for democracy and society to have a more open platform, and I am sympathetic to that agenda.”

Full video: New York Times Events “Where Does Netflix Go from Here? With C.E.O. Reed Hastings“ (Nov 2022)

More popular advice from Reed Hastings

Netflix founder Reed Hastings tells the story of the startup CEO who cleaned the coffee cups “What happened is he was an incredibly charismatic guy that didn’t have a good product/market fit vision. And we built an incredibly elaborate product and ultimately sold one copy of it to one customer who never installed it… It’s a funny thing about leadership. You can be very personally compelling and high integrity — that’s great. But you also got to lead people in the right direction.” (full article).

Reed Hastings on the importance of focus “In hindsight, we realized that when attacked, we should retreat to do the core better… It was a great lesson for us on focus. Now when people ask us if we’re getting into news or sports, we’re like: ‘Absolutely not!’ And we’re really confident in our answer. Movies and TV shows on a global basis is an enormous market.” (full article).

Reed Hastings on how to fire someone. “What we’re trying to do is get away from ‘you suck.’.. and I’m being honest as opposed to being hurtful… The more it is socialized with all of you as if it was in sports—where it’s not as much a life kind of thing, it’s a performance kind of thing—the better.” (full article).