I just noticed something worth stopping for. At a time when Netflix delivered the best financial results in its history—revenue of $12.25 billion with 16% year-over-year growth and net profit jumping 83%—its founder Reed Hastings chose to announce his complete departure from the company after June. There is no greater conflict than this.

Hastings built Netflix from scratch in 1997, turning it from a DVD rental service into a global streaming giant serving more than 325 million subscribers. Thirty years of work. But in 2023, he stepped down as CEO and remained Chairman of the board. Now he is disappearing entirely from the picture.

In its official filing to U.S. authorities, the company said: there is no disagreement with the company. But the more they stress that there is no disagreement, the more curiosity grows about exactly what he is doing. The answer is in the fine details.

Two months before announcing his departure, Reed Hastings joined the board of Anthropic. He does not own shares in the company; he joined through an independent committee with a single mission: to ensure that the development of artificial intelligence serves the long-term interests of humanity. This choice reveals a great deal about his thinking.

Someone who studied a master’s in artificial intelligence at Stanford 40 years ago, and then built an empire on a simple idea: reducing the cost of delivering content. Now he sees the same dynamic happening again—at a terrifying speed.

In 2024, he was optimistic: AI is a tool that will help us produce more. But in March 2025, he donated $50 million to Bowdoin College to study the impact of AI on work, education, and human relationships. He said a completely different sentence: we will fight for humanity’s survival.

In an interview a few weeks ago, when asked about Netflix’s biggest threat, he dismissed the competitors and the numbers and said just two words: artificial intelligence. His real question: if AI produces free content on YouTube of sufficient quality, who will pay for Netflix?

The scene is changing at an extraordinary pace. In February, ByteDance released a video generation model that turns a single image into a complete 2K video in 60 seconds. In the field of online advertising, one person accomplishes in 30 minutes what used to require 7 people over 3 days, at a cost of less than 1% of the previous expense. Workers in Hengdian, actors, and editors are all talking about the same fear: unemployment.

Hastings has seen this before. Netflix itself was the disruptor that killed DVDs, harmed cable TV, and forced Hollywood to rebuild itself. He knows how this cycle works: new technology, lower costs, new winners, old losers.

Now he is sitting at the AI table with Netflix’s money. He owns shares in the company he founded, with a net worth of $5.8 billion, most of it tied to it—yet he is sitting with people who could upend the industry. This may not be called retirement, but rather a smart hedge.

Netflix itself did not ignore the issue. It spent $6 billion to acquire InterPositive, a company specializing in AI-powered film production tools. They use AI to accelerate scripts, scenes, and editing. But this is an efficiency improvement within the current model. What worries Reed Hastings is that the production threshold itself is dropping from millions of dollars to a few dollars.

The timing was extremely precise. The best financial report in history—yet the stock fell 8% after hours. And on the same day, he announced his complete departure. After June, his name will disappear from Netflix’s board. He will remain a member of Anthropic and Bloomberg, and the owner of a ski resort in Utah.

Is this a vision of the future, or excessive worry? Maybe the answer will come on the day AI produces a film that the audience wants to watch all the way to the end.