Goldman's Ex-CEO Manages Billions but Picks Netflix's Cheapest Ad-Supported Plan

Source: My First Million | Published: 2026-06-24T09:00:02Z

Lloyd Blankfein oversees billions in assets yet opts for Netflix's cheapest ad-supported tier. Growing up poor leaves a financial anxiety that no amount of wealth can fully erase.

The app is spreading among Gen Z in Seoul. It exposes something that's always been true: pleasure so often comes from the process, not the outcome.

East Asian Internet Is Western Internet's Time Machine

This isn't the first time.

Ten years ago, podcaster Sam was researching the livestreaming industry when he saw something on an Asian platform: 7,000 people watching a girl eat noodles, chat text scrolling right to left across the screen, viewers spending thousands of dollars on virtual roses to send her. He studied it like an anthropologist examining a foreign tribe, then replicated as many elements as possible in his own product.

We all know what happened next. Livestreaming swept the West.

The same pattern played out in mobile gaming (PUBG Mobile, Free Fire → Fortnite) and live commerce (mainstream in Asia for years → Whatnot valued at over $10 billion in the US). The next thing worth watching is vertical short dramas — serialized shows with 30-to-60-second episodes, shot for portrait-mode phone screens, addictive soap operas across every genre. Already massive in China, Japan, and Korea. Now spreading to India.

The "Honda Strategy": Start Cheap, Never Raise Prices

Kevin Ryan co-founded MongoDB and Business Insider. Sam emailed him repeatedly asking how to build a media company. Ryan eventually replied, offering a strategy that still holds up today.

Ryan compared Business Insider's playbook to Honda taking on GM in 1985. At the time, Honda was a joke in the US — car doors sounded thin when you shut them, while GM doors closed with a satisfying thud that felt solid. But Honda did one thing: quality improved every year. Prices didn't.

GM had no idea what that meant.

Business Insider followed the exact same logic: content priced far below the Wall Street Journal's, but quality rising steadily, with prices (to readers) held constant. Ryan called this "Hondaization" — gain traffic with good-enough quality, then slowly close the quality gap without raising prices.

TCL televisions took the same path. Ten years ago, a 65-inch TCL cost $200 and looked mediocre. Today the same price buys mainstream quality. Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis followed the same arc.

Consumer Surplus: What Costco and Amazon Are Actually Doing

Investor Nick Sleep ran a fund for roughly 15 years, compounding at over 20% annually, then voluntarily shut it down and walked away. The fund was concentrated in three positions: Costco, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Nick Sleep developed a concept: shared scale economies.

Conventional scale economies work like this: more customers mean lower per-customer costs, which means higher profits. What Sleep noticed was a variation: some companies take those cost savings from scale and pass them entirely to consumers instead of converting them into margins.

Costco is the clearest example. Costco buys in massive volume, secures rock-bottom prices, then passes nearly all of those savings to members as low prices. On a $100 annual membership, the average member saves roughly $1,000 on purchases annually. Costco trades $100 for $1,000 worth of perceived value.

Costco makes almost no profit on food. Its profit comes almost entirely from membership fees — which are pure margin. When Sleep analyzed companies, he wasn't looking at reported profits. He was asking: how fast is this company growing the surplus it delivers to consumers? He calculated that Costco's consumer surplus grew from a few billion per year to tens of billions, while traditional analysts stared at the thin accounting profits and completely underestimated the depth of the moat.

Amazon is the same story. For twenty years, Bezos took almost no profit out of the business, reinvesting everything into broader selection, faster shipping, and lower prices — the three things he believed consumers cared about most. Prime and Costco memberships follow identical logic: monetize the enormous value delivered to users through a single annual fee.

SpaceX fits the same pattern. It cut the cost of orbital launches by a factor of 100, but didn't pocket the savings — it passed them to government customers and captured roughly 80% of the market. Starlink is applying the same playbook to global internet access.

Goldman's Former CEO Won't Pay for Netflix Premium

Lloyd Blankfein was the face of Wall Street villainy during the 2008 financial crisis. Protesters camped outside his home. He leaned over his fifth-floor balcony and shouted down to them: try getting a loan from Goldman — you can't.

He grew up poor in Brooklyn. Father was a postal worker, mother a housewife. He got through Harvard on financial aid, became a lawyer, found it boring, jumped to a commodities trading subsidiary of Goldman — a relatively unglamorous corner of the firm at the time. He climbed from there to CEO.

Sam asked him how he manages his personal wealth. Blankfein said roughly 80% of his net worth sits in public equities, with 90% of that in actively traded positions. He said he's obsessed with the game — but when researching stocks, he often hits the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg paywall. He doesn't subscribe. "It feels wrong to spend the money."

Netflix too. He uses the cheapest ad-supported tier.

The same person manages billions of dollars and agonizes over subscription fees. This isn't a contradiction. As he explained it himself: the financial anxiety of his formative years got hardwired in. It became permanent.

David Rubenstein: From Eskimo Tax Schemes to a $500B PE Empire

When the Carter administration ended, David Rubenstein was 31 and unemployed. He was a Washington fixture — knew everyone, knew nothing about business.

He heard about a tax loophole: Alaska Native corporations could hold certain tax losses and sell them to buyers who needed offsets. If someone paid $7 million cash for $10 million in losses, the buyer had effectively purchased $3 million in tax savings at 70 cents on the dollar.

Rubenstein brokered both sides, organized roughly $2 billion worth of these deals, and made about $20 million over several years. That became the seed capital for the Carlyle Group.

Carlyle's early deals didn't go well — they tried to buy a Mexican restaurant chain called Chi-Chi's and failed. The inflection point came from Rubenstein's insight into Washington's political ecosystem: every four years, a wave of valuable government officials cycles out of power. They know people, know things — but you can't pay directly for their relationships (that's bribery). His solution: bring them in as partners, where they could naturally contribute to defense-related acquisitions.

Carlyle took off from there. It now manages roughly $500 billion in assets.

That's only half of Rubenstein's story. The other half is decades spent acquiring historical documents: he owns an original copy of the Magna Carta ($21 million), a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence, and Lincoln's signed Emancipation Proclamation. He has funded restorations of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, bankrolled a string of Ken Burns documentaries, and published five or six books on American history. He also hosts his own interview show on Bloomberg TV.

He describes himself as "not particularly smart, but hardworking, and good at connecting people." That self-characterization is probably accurate — and probably also his standard technique for disarming whoever he's talking to.

PSA: The Moody's of Trading Cards

There's a category of goods called "credence goods": even after you own one, you still can't evaluate its quality. Medicine is the classic example — after surgery, it's genuinely hard to judge whether your surgeon was good or exceptional.

Baseball cards, Pokémon cards, and soccer cards have always had the same problem. A Sammy Sosa rookie card: seller says "gem mint," buyer says "barely excellent." No universal standard, no way to verify authenticity.

Nat Turner used proceeds from his sale of Flatiron Health (roughly $2 billion) to acquire Collector's Universe at age 35 — the parent company of PSA, the world's largest card grading service with about 70% market share.

At the time of acquisition, PSA's grading backlog had grown to roughly $400 million in pending orders, with wait times exceeding a year. That backlog was part of the appeal: here was a great business being held back by poor operations. Add technology and efficiency, and there was a clear path to relisting.

PSA's business model is a third-party trust tax. It doesn't need to be the best buyer or seller. It doesn't need to hold inventory. Its capital requirements are minimal. What it needs to be is the universally acknowledged trusted third party — and once you've achieved that, the position is nearly impossible to dislodge. If you have a card you think is worth serious money, would you send it to the third-ranked grader? Of course not. PSA-graded cards fetch higher prices, so people default to PSA, which makes PSA certification worth more, which reinforces itself in a closed loop.

PSA also runs a storage vault, holding millions of graded cards on behalf of collectors — playing both Moody's (rating) and Fort Knox (custody) simultaneously.

Where else can this model be built? The Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, EY) run the same logic in the M&A world — the line "we performed due diligence on the financials" has built a multi-billion-dollar business. Once a trust tax is successfully levied, it's close to permanent.