Reed Hastings Donates $500 Million in Netflix Shares to Charity

Reed Hastings has donated 790,000 shares of Netflix, valued at nearly $500 million, according to a regulatory filing. The shares were gifted to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which had previously received 2 million Netflix shares from Hastings in January. In total, Hastings has contributed approximately $1.76 billion in Netflix stock to the charity, which focuses on addressing systemic inequities in the Bay Area.

Hastings, co-founder, executive chairman, and former CEO of Netflix, made the donation on July 24, as disclosed in an SEC filing on Friday. While the specific beneficiary was not revealed, Hastings, through the Hastings-Quillin Family Trust with his wife Patty Quillin, retains 2,201,541 shares in Netflix.

In addition to this significant gift, Hastings recently announced a $7 million donation to a super PAC supporting VP Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

Since co-founding Netflix in 1997, Hastings has been a notable educational philanthropist. In 2020, he and Quillin donated $120 million to Spelman College, Morehouse College, and the United Negro College Fund to support scholarships at historically Black colleges and universities. Last year, they gave $20 million to Minerva University, and $10 million to Tougaloo College, an HBCU in Mississippi. They have also supported the KIPP Foundation, which operates a network of tuition-free charter schools for low-income communities of color.