The year of the Apollo 13 incident, Hastings sold his software business Pure Atria to another tech company for more than $700 million.
Umm, I think they've mixed up movies with real life. Nothing was being sold for 700 million during the Apollo era.
Though according to Wikipedia, Pure Atria wasn't sold until 1997, though it did go public in 1995.
Now that I have my pedantry out of the way...
I agree that Netflix has become a schlock-generator that is hurting actors (and anyone else whose pay is based on film performance) as it's become another large company, but I don't think that disrupting Hollywood is a bad thing.
Hollywood had become a stagnant pit of corporatism and corruption long before Netflix existed, and was already hurting everyone who wasn't an A-lister, Producer, Director, or film company executive. I want good movies and film as well, but let's not lionize an industry that's rife with sexual abuse (including of minors, which is a problem your average workplace doesn't have), worker exploitation, and more.
They think they can make it up with H1B workers they will underpay and abuse, and to some extent they're right, but it's just selling their futures down the river. Eventually the H1B employees will dry up or start demanding better wages as well. To some extent this is already happening with India, and some companies are now shifting their outsourcing and H1B hires to Pakistan. Anything to avoid paying compensation that actually reflects the contributions to the org's success.
I agree that Republicans are going full-fascist (even more than they were in the past), but if the establishment Democrats are clearly more willing to hand Republicans control than change themselves or lose control of the party, are they really any better? Nazis vs Nazi Collaborators isn't much of a choice. I would have said that was hyperbole in the past, but the centrist Dems covering for Israel is making it pretty on-the-nose.
Most executives at large publishers aren't gamers. Pretty pictures are more likely to entice them than deep mechanics. They could assign 5 people to make a game like Balatro or Stardew Valley, but they never would because they don't work like that, they came up through the MBA route and think in terms of enterprise software development lifecycles. Also, "making money" isn't good enough for them, they want to make so much money that they can pay themselves millions of dollars despite never actually contributing to the game.
To be fair, it's entirely possible that they've been refused insurance. My relatives near water cannot get insured for anything less than a small fortune. Insurance companies know that climate change is making disasters more likely, and they're adapting. Hell, I had my auto insurance literally drop me over wild fires here in California (despite me living in an urban area that will never have one), and that's literally mandatory coverage to drive.
Congrats on the new job! Hope things start to look up for you.