Even as the once-beloved red envelope that perfectly symbolized the convenience of Netflix’s video service is reduced to tatters in its customers' eyes, Wall Street pundits have begun sounding alarms about CEO Reed Hastings' profit-taking windfall.
As the Wall Street Journal pithily remarked about the service's now-shrinking consumer base, “If the CEO of Netflix Inc. were in a movie, the townspeople would be chasing him with torches and pitchforks.”
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To adopt that metaphor to Wall Street’s view of recent Netflix history, the most knowledgeable townspeople are holding a lantern close to Hastings’ apparently legal but somehow discouraging practice of regularly unloading chunks of his own Netflix holdings — and apparently finding some witchcraft afoot.