Bezos’s lieutenants met with CEO Reed Hastings several times during Netflix’s formative years but they always reported back that Hastings was “painfully uninterested” in selling, according to one Amazon business-development exec. Hastings himself says that Amazon was never truly serious about an acquisition of Netflix because “the basic operating rhythms” of the DVD-rental space, which required multiple small fulfillment centers to send discs out and then receive them back, were so different from Amazon’s core retail business. “It made no sense for them to be an aggressive bidder because it
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