The day after President Joe Biden dropped out of the election, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings made a mistake. “Congrats to Kamala Harris — now it is time to win,” he posted on X. It subsequently came out that Hastings had donated $7 million to the vice president’s campaign, and days later, on July 26, Netflix had its highest rate of cancellations all year.
On average, Netflix has a remarkably low churn, or rate of cancellations, compared to its streaming competitors. But after Hastings came out as Team Harris, Netflix’s cancellation rate nearly tripled. Calls to #CancelNetflix spread through social media, and, as the numbers show, they were not empty threats.
Netflix may be home to comedy specials by Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle, but that doesn’t mean anything about the company leans right, from its leadership to its employees. Hastings being a big-time Democratic donor is no surprise, given his past donations to the Clinton and Biden campaigns. Among his underlings, a full 100% of Netflix employees’ political donations went to Democrats this year, according to data from Quiver Quantitative.
The especially fragile Netflix employees staged a walkout in 2021 over supposedly “transphobic” content in Chappelle’s comedy special. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos apologized at the time for not acknowledging “that a group of our employees were in pain, and they were really feeling hurt from a business decision that we made.”
But Sarandos didn’t feel too bad about it. The Closer remains on Netflix to this day, proving that business considerations, rather than adherence to a specific orthodoxy, still guide Netflix’s decisions most of all. We’ll see whether or not Netflix recoups its lost subscribers, but Hastings may want to keep his political opinions to himself.
It’s been a good couple of years for conservative boycotts. After Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April 2023, the resulting boycott may have cost Bud Light’s parent company a whopping $1 billion. That same year, Target rolled out a pride collection replete with “tuck-friendly” bikini bottoms, made for male-to-female transitioners. It also partnered with a designer who elsewhere sold merchandise reading “Satan respects pronouns” and “depicting a guillotine with the label ‘Homophobe Headrest,’” according to the Washington Post. Thanks to the ensuing boycott, Target lost billions in market value.
Sometimes boycotts can help soulless corporations find their souls. In their 2019 book Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? economists Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi have a simple answer: No.
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“We find that rather than corrupting our morals, the opposite is true,” they write. “The evidence suggests that the market actually improves our morals. … We argue that the market is a moral space that both depends on its participants being virtuous and also rewards them for being virtuous.”
Conservatives have embraced the potency of the purse, and corporations are realizing that not everyone accepts the same values as white-collar workers, or septum-pierced baristas, in Silicon Valley and New York City. The beauty of a market economy is that CEOs are beholden to the consumers who buy their products and who line, or don’t line, their pockets.