Netflix Cuts 1,000 Jobs and Its Content Chief in 48 Hours, Proving It Can Still Binge Something

Netflix has always been good at one thing: making you finish what you started. On Wednesday it started laying off roughly 1,000 people. By Thursday it had auto-played the next episode, and the next episode was the chief content officer.

Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters announced the cuts in a memo saying the company would be "letting go of roughly 6% of our colleagues, with the greatest impact to our product, tech, legal, and HR teams." Note the last one. Cutting HR in the middle of a layoff is a bold strategy. It is like evacuating the fire department first so the fire has more room to grow.

The memo insisted, "Our business is strong and growing," which is the corporate version of a man saying "I'm fine" while his furniture is visibly leaving on a truck. It promised to "invest aggressively in high-impact areas," and 1,000 employees learned in real time that they were the low-impact areas.

Then came Thursday. Bela Bajaria, at Netflix since 2016 and chief content officer since 2023, is leaving. Her replacement is former Disney executive Peter Rice, starting October 26. Sarandos called Rice "one of the most effective at-scale operators in the entertainment industry," a compliment that sounds like it was written for a forklift.

Bajaria's tenure gave the world "KPop Demon Hunters," NFL games and WWE. Netflix rewarded her the way it rewards any show with a loyal audience: beloved, binged, and canceled before anyone could ask why.

The numbers explain the mood. Nielsen data put YouTube at 14.2% of U.S. TV streaming time in July, against Netflix's 7.8%. The world's most expensive storyteller is being outwatched by a website where a man in Ohio reviews gas station sandwiches. Live programming eats 5% of the content budget and holds 1% of watch time, the ratio of a wedding band to an open bar.

Netflix stock is down 40% from a year ago. It closed Thursday at $72.61, up 3%, because nothing gets Wall Street out of bed like the word "replaced."

Ross Benes, an analyst at Emarketer, put it plainly: "Due to the slowdown in massive hits and viewer growth, an ax was gonna fall on some executives who led content strategy." That "gonna" is doing heroic work. It is the first market forecast that sounds like a horror trailer. Fitting, since Netflix already walked away from buying Warner Bros. Discovery once the price stopped being "financially attractive," a phrase usually reserved for dating apps.

Sarandos told staff, "I know this is a big change in a year that has already had its share." Rice praised Netflix for being "willing to take chances on distinctive voices and fresh ideas." Somewhere, 1,000 distinctive voices are freshening up their LinkedIn.

The layoff memo called this "one of the most dynamic times in the history of entertainment." True. Dynamic is what you call a season when nobody, including the writers, knows who makes it to the finale.

For years Netflix has paused your night to ask whether you are still watching. This week it turned the question on its own building. A thousand people never got to click yes.