I was going to make some kind of Sense8 “canceled before its time” joke about Netflix’s last CAO leaving after just three months alas nothing came to me which is probably for the best because it would have been a stupid joke anyway.
Deadline reports that Netflix has found a new CAO, hopefully this one can stick it out longer than the last one.:
Netflix has hired PayPal veteran Jeffrey Karbowski, 45, as VP and Chief Accounting Officer.
The staffing move follows a somewhat unusual sequence in 2022. Karbowski’s predecessor was Ken Barker, who joined the company after a 19-year run at video game maker Electronic Arts, only to resign last September after only three months in the job. An SEC filing at the time said the departure was due to personal reasons.
Karbowski will report to Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann, who had been heading up accounting pending a search.
What does Chief Accounting Officer at a struggling streaming service pay anyway?
Netflix said in an SEC filing it is paying Karbowski an annual base salary of $2 million, a one-time signing bonus of $400,000 and $1 million in annual stock options.
Netflix has had a rough go in the last year — its difficulty finding and retaining a CAO notwithstanding — getting sued by shareholders last spring for making “materially false and/or misleading statements” and failing to “disclose material adverse facts about the company’s business, operations, and prospects.” Shareholders claim that Netflix and its leaders “employed devices, schemes and artifices to defraud [investors], while in possession of material adverse non-public information,” in a suit filed in federal district court in San Francisco (Pirani v. Netflix Inc et al., No. 22-cv-02672, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California). This on top of the actual subscriber loss and some internal culture issues that persist to this day.
Related: here’s a Hill opinion piece from some guy who wants you to get off his lawn about why Netflix deserves to die a slow death after successfully rotting all of our brains.
According to LinkedIn, Karbowski did time at EY, starting in audit in 1999 and leaving as a capital markets senior manager in July 2008. From there he went to Skype, then Microsoft, then PayPal and now ending up at Netflix.
Best of luck to him.
Netflix Hires PayPal Vet Jeffrey Karbowski As Chief Accounting Officer, Replacing Short-Tenured Predecessor [Deadline]
