Theodore Anthony Sarandos Jr.

Sarandos is the Hollywood-and-content half of Netflix’s two-headed leadership. Greg Peters runs product, technology, the ads stack, and game development; Sarandos runs the slate, the studios relationships, and the publicly-facing strategy on what Netflix is willing to spend money to make. The split has held without visible friction since January 2023 and has now survived both Reed Hastings’s full disengagement from operations and a high-profile failed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

His public posture on the ad tier — first signaled at Cannes Lions in 2022, before the launch — has hardened into the throughline of every quarterly cycle: the ad plan is the growth engine, scale is compounding (4,000-plus advertisers, more than 60 percent of new sign-ups in ads-available markets), and Netflix expects to roughly double ad revenue to $3 billion in 2026. Sarandos’s contribution to that narrative is the demand side — convincing the talent and the studios that ad-supported Netflix is still the same Netflix.