Netflix (NFLX) loses fewer customers than anyone in streaming. Just over 2% of its U.S. subscribers quit, by Antenna's count, the best rate in the industry. On Wednesday morning it told employees it's cutting 6% of its staff, about 1,000 jobs around the world. That's the deepest cut since 2022. On Thursday Netflix said its chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, is leaving after a decade.
Co-chief executives Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos sent the email, the Journal's Joe Flint and Jessica Toonkel report. Most of the cuts fall on product, tech, legal and human resources. The bosses said the company is still on track for its full-year earnings forecast. They described the cuts as “making focused choices across the business.” The timing is a week before quarterly earnings. The last big round, in June 2022, came right after Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade. This time the company is still growing, just more slowly, and people are watching less.
Netflix has tried nearly everything to win back attention. It added channels, bundles with other streamers, video podcasts, YouTube creators' shows, live sports and live events. Shares are still down more than 40% over the past 12 months. They slid during the company's $72 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery's studios and HBO Max, a contest Netflix quit in February. Paramount finished its own purchase of Warner this month, at $81 billion. Disney and Amazon have cut jobs in recent months too.
The $20 billion desk changes hands
Bajaria held the purse for roughly $20 billion of shows and movies, the Journal's Ben Fritz reports. Squid Game and Wednesday came out on her watch, and so did the push into live events and NFL football. Her replacement is Peter Rice. He started in Fox's movie division in 1989, made his name running Fox Searchlight, then held a top TV job at Disney after the 2019 Fox deal. He was fired three years later. His job now is to find the next Stranger Things and Bridgerton, shows that are aging or already over.
Our read
Career, with a Cash Flow · M5 footnote. Hold, and Netflix isn't in any of our 81 books. The business story is simple. A company can keep nearly every customer and still cut a thousand jobs, because the market grades growth, and growth slowed. The career story is the one we'd underline. The cuts fell on product, tech, legal and HR, at a profitable company that says it'll hit its numbers. Profitable and safe stopped being the same word a while ago.
Here's your connection. If you work in a support role, legal, HR, finance, or on a product team far from the hits, a “focused choices” memo is written about you. Do two things this week. Count the months of expenses sitting in your emergency fund, in cash or Treasury bills, and write the number down. Then find your company's severance policy and your next stock-vesting date, so you know what a Wednesday-morning email would actually cost you. Six months of expenses is the floor we plan around in most households. You pack the umbrella while the sky is still blue.