'They laughed us out of the room': In 2000, Netflix founders wanted to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million. Today, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars

In 2000, Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings wanted to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million. Today, the OTT company is worth $324.37 billion, while the latter is bankrupt.

Netflix is currently valued at $324.37 billion, but about 26 years ago, its founders wanted to sell the company for just $50 million.

The incident happened in 2000, when Netflix founders Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings wanted to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million. At the time, Blockbuster was a leading American multimedia brand.


Blockbuster Video was established in 1985 as a single home video rental store, but later became a chain offering video game rentals, DVD-by-mail, streaming, video on demand and cinema services. The company had meteroic rise in the 1990s and by 2004, it had 84,300 employees worldwide and operated 9,094 stores.

On the other hand, Netflix was just getting started then. It was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in 1997, just three years earlier. Considering that Netflix was still in its infancy and the dot-com bust was underway, its $50 million valuation was significant at the time.

Marc Randolph revealed the incident in his 2019 book. Blockbuster's then-CEO, John Antioco, reportedly dismissed Netflix as a niche business and said, "the dot-com hysteria is completely overblown."

"In 2000, at the depth of the dot-com crash, Reed Hastings and I tried to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million. They laughed us out of the room. Today, the company they could have bought for $50 million has a market cap north of $150 billion. And the company that once had 9,000 stores is down to a single one," Marc revealed in a post on X in 2023.

Marc added, "But what lesson to take from this? That it’s possible for a handful of people, with no prior experience in the video business, to take down a $6 billion category-leading company? Sure. But I think the more important lesson — a lesson that Blockbuster learned too late — is simply this: If you are unwilling to disrupt yourself, there will always be someone willing to disrupt your business for you."

What happened to Blockbuster?

Blockbuster’s decline was driven by a combination of leadership decisions, changing consumer habits and the rapid rise of Netflix. The Great Recession also added pressure as the company suffered significant revenue losses in the late 2000s.

Netflix emerged as one of Blockbuster’s biggest challenges. As consumers increasingly shifted toward DVD-by-mail and later online streaming, Blockbuster struggled to adapt its business model quickly enough. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010.

In 2011, satellite television provider Dish Network acquired Blockbuster’s remaining assets, including about 1,700 stores. Dish subsequently closed most of the company-owned locations, and by 2014, the last 300 company-owned Blockbuster stores had shut their doors.

The Blockbuster name did not disappear completely, however. Dish ended corporate support for the brand but allowed a small number of independently owned franchise stores to continue operating.

Further closures followed over the next several years. By 2019, only one franchised Blockbuster store remained — the now-famous location in Bend, Oregon.

The corporate entity that once owned Blockbuster also continued to exist. As of 2025, it remains a shell company known as BB Liquidating, Inc. The company later attracted attention during the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, even though Blockbuster itself had long since disappeared from the mainstream video-rental business.

Today, Blockbuster is largely remembered as an example of how quickly a dominant business can be overtaken when technology and consumer habits change faster than a company’s strategy.