Netflix CEO says colleagues have been affected by the travel ban
BARCELONA, Spain -- Netflix employees were personally affected by President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban people entering from seven Muslim countries, the company’s CEO said Tuesday.
Reed Hastings has been a critic of the temporary travel ban, which Trump hopes to revive in a revised form this week, and told The Associated Press on Tuesday that some of his co-workers had gotten caught up in it.
“We had Iranian and Iraqi employees who were unable to come to work,” he said on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress, the wireless industry’s biggest annual gathering held in Barcelona, Spain.
Netflix was among dozens of tech companies that publicly opposed the travel ban out of fear that it would stifle innovation. Hastings aims to make Netflix even more global, including by creating more original content in foreign languages.
“We are focused on international expansion, mainly in Europe and Asia,” Hastings said. “It’s just the beginning of the Internet. We are producing all over the globe with great success, now also in Spain, France, Germany, the U.K., Turkey, India, and even Japan, with anime shows.”
Netflix, which has some 93 million subscribers across 190 countries, is riding the success of some of its own productions, having won its first ever Oscar this week for the documentary “White Helmets,” about Syria’s humanitarian aid force.
