Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos says that the entertainment industry “certainly gets overlooked” and “thrown under the bus” when it comes to trade deals.
In an interview at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday, the executive said that the streamer contributed $125 billion to the U.S. economy between 2020 and 2024, creating 140,000 production jobs across 500 productions in all 50 states.
“The lion’s share of our investment is in the U.S. So we have 9,000 employees and 3 million feet of studio and 2 million feet of office space, primarily in California,” he said. “But I do think it gets overlooked as as an industry. So we get kind of thrown under the bus in trade deals occasionally. People forget this is a real business. You hardly ever see a sitting president photographed on a studio lot.”
In addition to its investment in the U.S., Netflix recently announced a $1 billion investment in Mexico in February. “I was thinking, if we were building a plant to build a billion dollars with the cars there, the president would certainly announce that,” Sarandos added. “So it’s very exciting.”
When asked if the Trump administration is “getting it wrong” by putting an increased emphasis on manufacturing rather than services broadly, Sarandos replied: “I think it’s feasible that there’s an evolution in the culture around the way people want to work and how they work, what they value that is more aligned with what you’re talking about.”
He also revealed that Netflix originally struck a deal to license its content in China 15 years ago to a company called iQIYI, but that it was ultimately not cleared by the country’s government-controlled censorship board.
“In three years, not a single episode of a single Netflix show cleared. They had no interest in us being in China,” Sarandos said. “So for me, I watched everybody spend the next decade grinding out all of their time to get there, and ultimately ended up in the same place I did, which is nowhere.”
That failed deal would pay off for the streamer, who is now one of the rare companies in the U.S. who has no exposure to China, he noted. The Trump administration has levied a 145% tariff on Chinese goods, causing the country to hit back with its own 125% tariffs on U.S. exports. It also said it would would “moderately reduce” film imports from the U.S., among other countermeasures.
“There’s a big business that, in the rest of the world, is happy to host Netflix,” Sarandos added.
Sarandos was also asked if the company plans to get into any new lines of business, such as theme parks, as it targets a $1 trillion market cap by 2030, which he emphasized was a “long-term ambition” rather than guidance.
“Just the parts that we do: $650 billion in consumer spending, we’re about 5% of that now. We are 10% of total TV-watching time in our most penetrated, most mature markets. So enormous room to grow just in the things that we do,” he continued. “In the previous five years, we’ve doubled our revenue, we grew profits 10 times and we grew our market cap three times. So there’s a path to it, obviously, but it all is incredibly dependent on executing well. We could not have done that if we didn’t execute well.”
While he didn’t rule out being “more adventurous” as Netflix gets bigger and broader, he emphasized that there’s a “linear growth path” in the core businesses it’s already in.
Though consumers shouldn’t expect Netflix to open a theme park anytime soon, the company will next launch its Netflix Houses in Dallas and King of Prussia, which will include dining, retail and ticketed experiences.
“It’s the next generation of what a theme park might be. I look at things like Top Golf and the way that people go and have a really go. They’ll go four or five times a year, bring their family and go four, five times a year, versus something you do once every five years. And it’s much, much more fluid and changes,” he explained. “It’ll be those things that we’ve been proving around the world, these experiences like the ‘Bridgerton’ ball… there’s a very unique relationship with IP and storytelling and people who express who they are to the shows that they love. So the Netflix Houses will bring scale to that traveling operation.”
