Netflix cancellations skyrocket after CEO endorses Kamala Harris

Reed Hastings, co-founder and chairman of Netflix, openly endorsed Kamala Harris ahead of the presidential election. Just days later, the popular platform suffered its worst day for subscriber cancellations in months.

"Congratulations to Kamala Harris, now is the time to win," Hastings wrote last July 22 on his X account, after the then-vice president's candidacy was made official.

Not content with this, the Netflix CEO donated seven million dollars to a pro-Harris super PAC. As a result, Donald Trump's supporters began a fierce social media campaign to try and convince conservative users to cancel their subscriptions to the famous platform.

As reported by Bloomberg with data from research group Antenna, just three days after Hastings' endorsement, on July 26, Netflix suffered its worst day in terms of cancellations since February.

"The spike in cancellations at Netflix lasted just a few days. It wasn’t as severe as the reaction in 2020 when conservatives asked Netflix to take down the French movie Cuties, which they felt exploited children," they added from the same media outlet.

Netflix's worst day for cancellations came in 2011, when some 800,000 users unsubscribed in protest over the company's plans to spin off the DVD-by-mail business.

Kamala Harris is a favorite of employees and executives at big tech companies.

Clarifying first that these are donations made to major candidates' campaign committees by executives and employees, not by the companies themselves, a report recently published by Quiver Quantitative showed that Google and Microsoft stung as the companies with the most donations to Harris' campaign.

Indeed, Google employees contributed 1.4 million and Microsoft employees contributed 743,000. Behind them are Brown & Brown (324,000), Johnson & Johnson (239,000), Apple (225,000), Oracle (218,000), Wells Fargo (169,000) and Nvidia (169,000), among many others.

In addition, employees of companies such as Amazon, Netflix, JP Morgan, Disney, Accenture and Pfizer donated in favor of Harris.

On the other side, Trump received the most money from employees and executives of American Airlines (134,000) and Walmart (83,000).

The ranking was followed by Lockheed Martin (69,000), United Airlines (67,000), FedEx (61,000), Wells Fargo (59,000), Johnson & Johnson (57,000), Brown & Brown (56,000), Southwest Airlines (55,000) and Northrop Grumman (52,000).