Netflix CEO Hastings Made $31 Million

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 1:10PM EST · Published Dec 29, 8:25AM EST

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Netflix CEO Hastings Made $31 Million — © Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Netflix Inc.’s (NASDAQ: NFLX) chief executive and board chair, Reed Hastings, did well last year. Very well. He made $31.5 million.

Just $700,000 of that total was base salary, while $30.8 million was stock options. This is on top of the 10.6 million shares he owns.

Netflix released the compensation of its top five executives in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Hastings is not the only one who did well. Chief Financial Officer David Wells made $6.3 million, of which $3.5 million was salary. Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos made $31.5 million, of which $18.0 million was salary. Chief Product Officer Greg Peters made $16.8 million, of which $10.0 million was salary. And David Hyman, general counsel and secretary, made $7.3 million, of which $3.5 million was a base salary.

The SEC requires that companies release the pay of their top five executives each year. The agency calls these the “named officers” of the company.

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Based on the company’s stock market performance, the executives could say they were fairly compensated. Despite the year-end sell-off that affected all the mega tech stocks, Netflix shares were up 24% to $256. Netflix has a market cap of $111 billion.

Netflix also had a banner year in terms of growth. Revenue in the third quarter was $4 billion, up from $3 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Net income was $403 million, up from $130 million. Even more extraordinary was the pace of subscriber growth. By the end of the third quarter, Netflix had 137 million subscribers, up from 109 million. The company forecast the figure would rise to almost 147 million by the end of this year.

Many investors would say that the five Netflix executives earned every penny, in terms of what they were paid.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.