Reed Hastings, the founder and executive chairman of Netflix, has donated $1.1 billion worth of Netflix (NFLX) stock, or roughly 40 percent of his total company holdings, to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a California charity, according to an SEC filing on Jan. 26 and a Bloomberg report yesterday (Jan. 29) confirming the receiving entity. The SEC filing shows Hastings made the donation on Jan. 24 and Jan. 25. The reason was not disclosed, however.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a Mountain View, Calif.-based nonprofit that focuses on solving regional issues of insecure housing, child development and racial equity, according to its website. It was formed in 2007 as the result of a merger between two charities—the San Mateo-based Peninsula Community Foundation and the San José-based Community Foundation Silicon Valley—and has grown exponentially since.
Today, the foundation is the largest in the Silicon Valley region. It received over $2.5 billion in contribution in 2023 alone. Other prominent tech executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, have all made multimillion-dollar donations to the organization.
Hastings, 63, has donated to other philanthropic organizations in the past, especially to universities. Last year, he gave $20 million to Minerva University in San Francisco. In 2022, Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, gave $120 million to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
According to Forbes, Hastings is currently worth $4.1 billion and he owns 2 percent of Netflix after the donation. He was CEO of the company from its founding in 1997 until 2023 and had been sharing the role with Ted Sarandos since 2020. Greg Peters took over as co-CEO along with Sarandos after Hastings stepped down in January of last year.
