Netflix founder Reed Hastings backed Barack Obama, joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s The Giving Pledge, but has zero hobbies

The US$40 late fee Reed Hastings paid after temporarily losing a rented video in 1997 may have been the best money he ever spent.

That fee gave the America entrepreneur the idea for Netflix, the entertainment giant he co-founded and leads as chief executive. Hastings has since built a US$5 billion fortune, a portion of which he has spent supporting US educational reform and bolstering the campaigns of Democrats running for office.

Hastings’ representative at Netflix did not respond to requests for comment on his career trajectory, net worth, philanthropy and political donations, but keep reading to learn what we do know about Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings.

Reed Hastings, 59, is the son of a Nixon administration lawyer

Hastings was born in Boston in 1960, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His father, Wilmot Reed Hastings, worked in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Richard Nixon. The elder Hastings‘ work earned the family an invitation to Camp David, the president’s country residence, when the future Netflix CEO was a child, per The New York Times.

“We rode around in golf carts, had a tour, and I saw that President Nixon had a gold-coloured toilet seat,” Hastings told The Times in 2006.

After Hastings graduated from high school, he did a year-long stint as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman before enrolling in Bowdoin College. Hastings joined the Marine Corps while still in school, but later petitioned to join the Peace Corps instead because “[I] found myself questioning how we packed our backpacks and how we made our beds” and “questioning wasn‘t particularly encouraged”, per The Times.

Hastings later earned a graduate degree from Stanford. “I didn't get into my first choice, which was MIT,” he told The Times.

Netflix isn’t Hastings’ first company