Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-CEO who taught Hollywood to binge and now needs growth

Ted Sarandos

Photo: UKinUSA / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 30, 1964 Phoenix
Occupation	Businessperson
Awards	Time 100

On the Tuesday that Netflix told Wall Street its advertising business would bring in less money than promised, Ted Sarandos spent part of the call thanking the executive he had just replaced. Bela Bajaria, a decade at the company and its chief content officer, was gone. Peter Rice, the former Disney and Fox television boss, was taking her job. “I know we can do better,” Sarandos said. It was an odd sentence from the man who, more than anyone, persuaded the entertainment business that Netflix knew what viewers wanted before they did.

The instinct he is asking a new lieutenant to sharpen was formed far from Hollywood. Sarandos grew up in Phoenix, one of five children of an electrician and a homemaker, in a family that rarely travelled; the way to see the world, he has said, was through books, movies and television. His grandfather had arrived from the Greek island of Samos as Alex Karyotakis and changed the family name. Writing for his high school paper, he landed an interview with Ed Asner, then the star of Lou Grant, who introduced him to other people in the business. Junior college ended the journalism plan. “I had this kind of epiphany in junior college that I was not a very good writer,” he told The Sunday Times, and there was no plan B.

What he had instead was a job at a video store. He went full time, became a store manager in the Arizona Video Cassettes West chain in 1983 and ran rental shops until 1988. Sarandos, who was born on July 30, 1964, then moved into distribution with East Texas Distributors and became vice president of product and merchandising at Video City/West Coast Video, a chain of almost 500 stores. There he struck revenue-sharing deals on DVDs with Warner Bros. and Sony, “an unheard-of thing at the time,” as he later described them. An article about those deals reached Reed Hastings, whose DVD-by-mail company needed someone who could buy films. Sarandos joined Netflix in 2000.

For more than a decade he ran what Netflix licensed, and then what it made. Lilyhammer opened the company’s slate of originals in 2012. The bet that changed television had come earlier: in March 2011 Netflix agreed to pay about $100 million for two seasons of House of Cards, David Fincher‘s drama with Kevin Spacey, without ordering a pilot. When the show arrived in February 2013, the whole first season went up on the same day. Sarandos called it “a super-practical decision”; the company’s data showed people watched different numbers of episodes in a sitting, but “nobody watched one.” Orange Is the New Black followed that summer, and Time put him on its list of the 100 most influential people.

His method became the one rivals spent the next decade copying. Order whole seasons, release them at once, judge a show by whether people finish it rather than by a ratings night. He has said his decisions rest roughly 70% on data and 30% on judgment, with judgment given priority. The catalogue grew from there into The Crown and Stranger Things, and in 2021 into Squid Game, the Korean survival drama that became the most-watched series Netflix has released. On the film side the company financed Alfonso Cuarón‘s Roma, which won Cuarón the Oscar for best director, and Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman. In July 2020 Sarandos was named co-chief executive alongside Hastings and joined the board. When Hastings became executive chairman in January 2023, Greg Peters took the seat beside him.

The record has a less flattering side, and Sarandos has supplied some of it himself. When Dave Chappelle’s special The Closer drew protests in 2021 over its jokes about transgender people, he defended it in a staff memo arguing that “content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.” Transgender employees organised a company-wide walkout, and Sarandos told Deadline he had “screwed up the internal communication”; the special stayed up. His position on cinemas has shifted in public too. At the TIME100 Summit in April 2025 he called films made for theatres “an outmoded idea, for most people, not for everybody,” and said Netflix was “saving Hollywood.” Months later, while bidding for Warner Bros., he committed to 45-day theatrical windows for the studio’s films. A company built on the argument that viewers prefer the sofa keeps finding reasons to rent the big screen.

That bid was the largest swing of his career. In December 2025 Netflix agreed to buy the Warner Bros. studios and HBO Max in a deal valued at about $72 billion, or roughly $82.7 billion including debt. Paramount Skydance answered with $31 a share for all of Warner Bros. Discovery. Sarandos defended Netflix’s plan before a Senate antitrust subcommittee that February, and on February 26, 2026, Netflix said it would not raise its price. He and Peters described the acquisition as a “nice to have” at the right price, not a “must have” at any price. Netflix collected a $2.8 billion break-up fee, and Paramount has since completed its takeover.

The autumn has been harder. At a Bloomberg media conference he admitted, “Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster.” In mid-October he and Peters cut about 1,000 jobs, roughly 6% of staff. Bajaria left within days, film chairman Dan Lin followed, and Rice was hired to run Netflix’s films, series and live events from October 26. On the third-quarter call on October 20, Netflix reported revenue of about $12.9 billion, 12% more than a year earlier, but lowered its advertising forecast for the year to about $2.7 billion, and the shares fell after hours. Sarandos insisted there was “no need for a fundamental shift in the strategy. We do need better execution in the U.S.”

Away from the office, Sarandos has two children from his first marriage, to Michelle Sarandos: the producer Sarah Sarandos and the film editor Anthony Sarandos. In 2009 he married Nicole Avant, the former U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas and daughter of the music executive Clarence Avant, and the couple live in Los Angeles. The Producers Guild of America gave him its Milestone Award in 2020, and Cannes Lions named him its entertainment person of the year in 2022.

The next test arrives quickly. Rice starts on October 26, and Sarandos has said the new content chief can shape titles for the fourth quarter and 2027 even though he greenlit none of them. On November 25 the David Fincher film written by Quentin Tarantino, with Brad Pitt back as Cliff Booth, opens for two weeks in IMAX theatres before it streams worldwide on December 23. The former clerk who learned his trade by watching what people rented now has to show investors that Netflix can still surprise its own subscribers.

Tags: Netflix, business, ceos, business leaders, Squid Game, House of Cards, Greg Peters, Ted Sarandos