Wilmot Reed Hastings, Jr. (b. 8 October 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts ) is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He is the founder, CEO, president and chairman of the board of Netflix.

Hastings attended high school at the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a lawyer who once served in the Nixon administration, serving as general counsel in the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. "One weekend when I was about 12, my parents, sisters and I were invited to Camp David, when the president wasn’t there. Elliot Richardson, who held several cabinet positions, invited us. We rode around in golf carts, had a tour and I saw that President Nixon had a gold-colored toilet seat."

Hastings studied mathematics at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and won its mathematics department's Smyth Prize in 1981. "I wanted to go to a small liberal arts school and went to Bowdoin College in Maine. I majored in math because I found the abstractions beautiful and engaging," said Hastings. Hastings received his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1983.