The co-founder of Netflix was never the flashiest of chief executives.
Reed Hastings conquered Silicon Valley and Hollywood but did not even have his own office. He and his wife raised their goats and chickens not in an ultra-wealthy enclave of the San Francisco Bay area or Los Angeles but in the sleepy surf town of Santa Cruz, where, according to Forbes, he was the only billionaire.
Yet two years after Hastings, 64, stepped back from the company and took on an arms-length role as chairman, here he is up a mountain in Utah, running his own private members’ club at a ski resort he has bought and part-privatized.
Trolls have predictably called him “Greed Hastings” and yet another “tech oligarch destroying something beautiful”. The resort’s Instagram account is a flurry of vows never to return. “So sad,” one commenter posted. Another added: “It was perfect before.”
Hastings is unfazed by the criticism.
“I’m pretty used to it from Netflix,” he said, sitting in a yurt on top of Powder Mountain. “You listen, and sometimes there’s valid points. The question is, what does the takeover bring? Is it good for the community?”
When he goes shopping at the local supermarket, people rarely say negative things. “Most are incredibly thankful, because they know the mountain was decaying and breaking down. Something needed to change.”
The United States offers several private ski clubs for the 1 per cent, arguably the most famous of which is Montana’s Yellowstone Club, whose members include Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, the singer Justin Timberlake and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Initial fees are reportedly $400,000 and annual dues more than $40,000 — and to join you need to buy or build a mountain home, with prices beginning at $3 million.
Trolls have predictably called him “Greed Hastings” and yet another “tech oligarch destroying something beautiful.”
“I mean, Yellowstone Club is beautiful, but I never wanted to be part of it,” said Hastings. “I never want to join private clubs. Too much of my life during the Netflix phase was hobnobbing with big mucky mucks.”
To join his club you must purchase a plot for about $2 million, build a house, pay a one-off fee rumoured to be about $200,000, then cough up $30,000 to $100,000 in annual dues.
So far about 150 families have signed up; a further 450 will become available.
If enough people follow them, Hastings thinks it might do more than just rescue North America’s largest ski resort by acreage. It could transform the entire ski industry.
The US ski market is dominated by two companies that offer rival multi-resort annual passes: the Epic Pass allows access to 41 resorts for $1,047, and the Ikon Pass 58 resorts for $1,449. Critics say they cause overcrowding at resorts and make the mountains monotonous. (Hastings says he wishes he’d thought of it first, but admits they are now experiencing “growing pains”).
He sees Epic and Ikon as the establishment behemoths and Powder Mountain as the challenger. “They’re like the Netflix, which is high-scale, global, aggressive, capitalist,” he says. “And now, ironically, I’m running the counter position.”
Hastings spent his childhood skiing in New England, so when his former company took off he bought a home in the sprawling Utah resort of Park City.
In 2016, he met the youthful founders of an events company, Summit, who had bought nearby Powder Mountain to host functions. They invited Hastings to visit, and within a month he had bought a plot. In the spring of 2023, Hastings stepped down at Netflix.
“Then it was: ‘I can breathe.’ The two guys who took over [at Netflix], Greg [Peters] and Ted [Sarandos], I’ve worked with for 20 years. They were like: ‘We got this, Grandpa.’ So it was not like they were calling every day for advice.”
Warned by friends not to commit himself too deeply in retirement, Hastings instead spent 50 days snowboarding — and noticed that the infrastructure at Powder Mountain was creaking.
“The Summit guys came to me and said, ‘Look, we’re sliding down towards bankruptcy. We’ve got to do something.’ ”
Why him? He laughs. “If I’m honest, it’s not that they came to me for my skill and insight. They came because I had the money to fix it.” Hastings is worth an estimated $5.5 billion and owns about three million shares of Netflix stock valued at about $1.9 billion.
“The question is, what does the takeover bring? Is it good for the community?”
He started as an investor, but became increasingly “wrapped into it”. His solution was partial privatization. Starting this season, three of the resort’s lifts are members-only, while five remain public.
He has also introduced dynamic pricing: a season pass cost $1,499 last summer; now it is $1,699. February weekends are exclusively for those with season tickets.
To keep the local community engaged, Hastings has rolled out $19 night skiing from 4pm to 9pm — it’s so popular among families it has sold out for all of January. To reduce congestion at weekends, parking costs $12 — unless you have three or more people in your car.
Perks planned for the private side include a roving cocktail bar mounted on a snowcat crawling the pistes. It is trial and error, seeing what works. The industry is watching closely.
Nick Sargent, the president of Snowsports Industries America, said he “really applauds” the innovation on show.
Rick Kahl, the former editor of Ski Area Management magazine, said: “Hastings has the right idea, and that you have to find some way to afford all this, this new equipment, new lifts or other facilities. And he’s trying to say, ‘OK, I’m going to get that money from the wealthy folks who are going to be part of the private resort. And some of that will go to fund the public scheme and services. But I’m going to give the private folks enough of an exclusive benefit that they won’t object to that.’ He’s trying to satisfy both of those groups, which is not easy.”
Hastings himself plays down any suggestion that he is trying to disrupt the ski industry the way he once changed film and television.
“A Netflix-like opportunity is once in a hundred years,” he said. “This isn’t really in the same league, because it’s not built on some fundamental transformative force — the biggest of our lifetimes being the internet. But I am, I think, differentially willing to question assumptions.”
Perks planned for the private side include a roving cocktail bar mounted on a snowcat crawling the pistes.
Keen to show off his plans, Hastings gave us an exclusive tour — his first since launching the scheme. The chairlift bar rises, and he is snowboarding smoothly down the slope, calling over his shoulder: “Follow me, towards the purple sign. You have to see this.”
In a glade of firs beyond the snow-frosted “artwork ahead” sign hangs a newly installed cast bronze bell by the sculptor Davina Semo.
Art is a large part of his plan: he has already installed a striking striped tunnel by artists Gerard & Kelly above the beginners’ conveyor belt, and purchased a concrete creation by James Turrell, the 81-year-old “master of light”. He is in discussions with planners over an idea to have carousel horses and rollercoaster cars on a chairlift, designed by EJ Hill.
Inspired by the Japanese art island of Naoshima and Storm King, the New York state sculpture park, he envisages “lots of little surprising, curated nooks”.
Powder Mountain was founded in 1972 by a sheep farmer, Alvin Cobabe, who also performed emergency medical operations on the mountain, climbed the towers, manned the snowcats and cleared the pistes.
He skied there until he was 82 and died in 2017, a few months short of his 100th birthday.
His daughter, Aleta, 72, thinks he would have had “mixed emotions” about Hastings’ involvement.
Cobabe was not averse to change, she said, describing him as “the epitome of an entrepreneur”, but on the other hand, “a big part of my father’s joy was having allowed the community to enjoy this beauty”.
Some members of that community are delighted by what Hastings is doing. “Him taking over is the best thing that could have happened,” said John Burrows, who turns 80 next week, a former downhill racing coach who works as a greeter at the resort.
“Skiers are very possessive. A mountain is not geography, it’s your girlfriend — you can’t criticize, or make any changes. But the previous owners owed $75 million in unpaid taxes. [Hastings] took it under his wing and has spent a fortune already, with brand new vehicles, wage increases, $1,200 Arc’teryx kit for the staff, he’s just going for it.
“It was left to rot … it needed major surgery. Everything he has done is the best in the industry, first class — not even business class.”
However, Ari Soffer, a jewelry designer from Los Angeles who has been coming to Powder Mountain every year since 2019, is much less happy. He is yet to visit this season, and will, but is not enthusiastic about what he will find.
“A Netflix-like opportunity is once in a hundred years. This isn’t really in the same league.... But I am, I think, differentially willing to question assumptions.”
“It’s just a bummer,” said Soffer, 54. “It was an epic little place, a hidden gem. Every year we had the feeling: ‘Is this going to be able to continue? Are they going to ruin it?’ And sure enough, somebody came in with a bunch of money and it was sold to the highest bidder. They turned it into all the other resorts. The vibe is ruined.”
Down in the valley, retired army colonel Mike Seguin, who now owns the Mad Moose Cafe, said Hastings’ moves were the talk of Eden, the nearest town. “It does feel a bit elitist,” said Seguin, who skis several times a season. “And he poached our staff! He raised the wages, so half of them left us to go up there.”
Hastings knows he is walking a tightrope, balancing the demands of the paying public with those of the high-end homeowners. But he thinks his approach can save the resort without the mountain losing its soul.
“Ski resorts are like boats — a hole that you pour money in,” he said. “I’m riding a lift and I’m like, ‘This thing really needs work’. We put in four lifts this year, which nobody does. It was reckless. But our team got it done.
“And that’s so different from the old Powder [Mountain], which was always talking about big dreams. We’re doing it.”
Harriet Alexander is a New York–based senior features reporter at The Times and The Sunday Times of London
