April 20, 2022. Pershing Square Capital Management sold its three-million-share Netflix position at an approximately $430 million loss after the streamer reported its first subscriber decline in more than a decade. [1] [2] Bill Ackman's exit letter that afternoon used the phrase "high degree of predictability" and told his investors he had lost it on Netflix. [1] Four years later to the week, Netflix's board is the one losing predictability.

The paper's Saturday coverage of Hastings's exit named the end of the founder era. What Ackman's 2022 loss adds to that story is institutional memory. Netflix's current board — the one that now loses Hastings in June — sits on a company whose most visible recent activist bet was $1.1 billion put in three months before a 35% single-day drop. [2] [3] The lesson the 2022 episode taught the street is not Netflix-specific. It is that major streaming subscriber prints can move the stock more than a quarter's earnings can.

The divergence now is the pattern Ackman would read. MSM treated Friday's 10% gap-down as a guidance miss and the Hastings exit as amicable. Finance X, re-reading the April 2022 letter this weekend, names the similarity: insider selling before the print, a WBD-related deal fee padding a narrow beat, and a co-founder leaving the room at precisely the moment institutional memory of Ackman's 2022 loss matters most to the next activist. [3]

Pershing Square is not long Netflix now. The April 2022 letter is the template anyone considering the position will read.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco