He’s the box set peddler who’s got the world hooked on shows like Stranger Things and The Crown.
Now the founder of Netflix is reaping the rewards of his company’s astonishing success by joining the exclusive ‘Billionaire’s Club’.
Reed Hastings, 57, has just been named as one of the 500 richest people in the world for the first time.
He’s been placed on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index after his wealth shot up by 50% this year to make him worth $4.1 billion.
The astonishing gain in his fortune is more than double the growth of Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos’ fortunes.
He’s now about as rich as 14,746 average Brits, according to Credit Suisse’s claim that each British person has a wealth of $278,038.
Reed has already ploughed his money into philanthropy. In 2016, the big-hearted billionaire stumped up $100 million to start a children’s’ education fund charity called the Hastings Fund
Judging by Reed’s previous comments about the future of entertainment, a good way to follow in his footsteps might be to start selling something a bit stronger than box sets.
He said that people could take ‘entertainment drugs’ in the future, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Netflix and Chill’.
‘In twenty or fifty years, taking a personalized blue pill, you just hallucinate in an entertaining way, and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable,’ he said, according to Engadget.
‘If the source of human entertainment in thirty or forty years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble.’
Hastings trained as a US marine before founding Netflix in 1997.
MORE: 10 of the best films on Netflix
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