How Netflix’s Bela Bajarjia Became One Of The World’s Most Powerful Women

The royal treatment comes well-earned: As the person who green-lights content for Netflix, the 55-year-old Bajaria is the queen of streaming, the person who decides how over 300 million subscribers around the world on any given night will watch shows and movies.

And her strategy clearly works. This week, the streaming giant raked in the most Golden Globe nominations—35, across film and television for blockbusters like Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, KPop Demon Hunters, shows like Adolescence, and more. “What has always served me well is this curiosity of wanting to build a business or a new thing,” Bajaria tells Forbes.

The building is just beginning. Bajaria already deploys $18 billion a year on content in 50 languages across 190 countries. With Netflix poised to take on the Hollywood assets of Warner Bros Discovery, pending regulatory approval of its $72 billion purchase, the person who occupies the No. 60 spot on the Forbes World’s Most Powerful Women list this year might soon be the most important executive in Hollywood, if the company adds jewels such as HBO and HBO Max and the Harry Potter and DC Comics franchises to her plate. (Warner Bros. had the second-most Golden Globes nominations this year, 31, thanks to Sinners, One Battle After Another and HBO’s White Lotus.)

“That she’s able to juggle not one, not two, not three but like fifteen balls and remain calm in that situation is pretty remarkable,” says Ari Emanuel, executive chairman of WME Group, who brokered the $5 billion WWE Raw deal with Bajaria to bring professional wrestling to Netflix. “At one point, we’re talking about boxing, next we’re talking about a series, then movies or stars—there’s no detail this woman doesn’t know, it’s crazy. I don’t ever tell her this, but it blows my mind.”

Yet the path forward remains uncertain. On December 7, President Trump praised Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos while expressing potential concerns about the market share of a combined media behemoth. The following day, Paramount announced a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros.—including cable networks CNN, Discovery Channel and more—that was nearly $18 billion higher than the Netflix bid.

Bajaria’s innate comfort with risk traces back to her own origin story, far from Hollywood’s glittering epicenter. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she spent her childhood zigzagging with her family across continents in pursuit of stability and opportunity, from London to Zambia and back again. In 1979, her father moved them to Los Angeles opening car washes in pursuit of the American dream.

For nine-year-old Bela, L.A. was a culture shock. “There was no frame of reference for what being Indian was,” she says. To fit in, she gravitated to television—watching I Dream of Jeannie and The Brady Bunch to lose her accent and learn American culture. Those shows revealed how stories could connect people and shaped her early sense of belonging, as well as her determination for self-destiny (her great-grandmothers were forced into marriage at the ages of 14). “I knew early on that the agency of not being told whom to marry and still control decisions was to have money,” she adds.

In Los Angeles, that meant the entertainment industry. After graduating from California State University, Long Beach in 1995, Bajaria landed a role at CBS as an assistant in the movies-and-miniseries department. “Everyone was my mentor, but they just didn’t know it,” she says. She read every script that came across her desk as well as the executive notes on it. Her dedication didn’t go unnoticed when, at 26, she was recommended by a departing high-ranking executive to take his place. “I never thought in a million years this person was paying enough attention to say you should give her my job. It was my biggest break for sure.”

After 15 years at CBS, where she rose through the ranks to run their in-house cable studio, Bajaria was offered the role of reviving the in-house studio at NBC Entertainment, under the new moniker Universal Television, making her the first woman of color in history to run a major television studio. She quickly began producing shows that NBC passed on, which she then sold to others: The Mindy Project (to Fox, then Hulu), Master of None (to Netflix) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (to Fox again). Within five years, she was fired, because, she says, she refused to “play the game.”

“I could look at myself in the mirror or just in my gut and know I did what was right for the business,” says Bajaria. “I didn’t sell or do something I thought was the wrong decision for political [reasons].”

After clearing her head on a planned family safari trip to Tanzania, Bajaria reached out to Sarandos, Netflix’s then-chief content officer, who had told her not to take another job before talking to him. Sarandos, who had bought several shows from Bajaria, pitched a role starting unscripted programming and running licensing. “I was like, ‘Okay, so you know all the things you’re offering me, I’ve never done those things,’” she recalls. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, I just hire smart people and you’ll figure it out.’”

And she did. “She took the energy and time to really figure out Netflix,” Sarandos tells Forbes. “What makes things work and why? Who does what, and how do you get to them? It was that relationship management piece—which is so hard to do in this town.”

Within two years, Bajaria also oversaw international content, transforming the streamer into a genuinely global studio. “We’ve always done well because we really have local creative executives who speak the language, come from the culture, or live there,” says Bajaria.

One of those projects led to the hit Korean series Squid Game, which premiered on Netflix in September 2021. Hwang Dong-hyuk was a well-respected writer and director who had written the movie script for Squid Game 12 years earlier, but couldn’t get it picked up until it reached Netflix’s team in South Korea, who worked with him to turn it into a series. “I don’t even know if we really bend the rules”, she says. “We just don’t buy the rules.” The following year, the show won six Emmy Awards.

“If they like something, they go for it,” says Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer, who has an extensive relationship with Netflix, having produced several projects, including Hillbilly Elegy and Tick, Tick…Boom! “They don’t say, ‘Let me get back to you and look at our algorithm.’”

As Bajaria succeeded, so did Sarandos. In 2020, he ascended the co-CEO role at Netflix, and three years later she succeeded him in the chief content officer role.

The most boring sporting event of 2024 also set a record for streaming: in-your-face, in-his-prime influencer Jake Paul facing off in the ring against the over-the-hill boxing legend Mike Tyson. While a younger Tyson would have obliterated the 27-year-old Paul, the 58-year-old version was left wheezing and holding on for dear life.

No matter: Some 108 million live global viewers tuned in to watch the stunt match, with around 65 million watching simultaneously at the broadcast’s height, making it the most streamed global sporting event in history. A month later, Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL doubleheader reached 65 million U.S. viewers, becoming the two most-streamed NFL games in U.S. history. Such numbers don’t come cheap. Under Bajaria, Netflix reportedly paid $150 million-per-year to the NFL for the very limited broadcast slate. But she’s done the math: sports sells, so she’s buying.

“Netflix got the value of the content”, says NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who had been discussing a potential partnership for years. “Bela’s a big sports fan herself. She understood what NFL content can do for their platform.”

And under Bajaria, the company built on bingeing whenever its convenient for viewers has increased its live offerings. In January, the platform will debut an interactive Star Search revival in which the real-time audience will vote to determine the winners. Netflix has also locked down exclusive U.S. broadcasting rights for the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup. And Bajaria’s commitment to F1 has changed the sport. Even before the streamer was reportedly considering a bid on broadcasting F1 races in 2026 (which ultimately landed at Apple in a 5-year $750 million deal)—she committed to creating a docuseries, Drive to Survive, in 2019 that built characters around drivers who were previously little more than a whizzing helmet.

“What we’re great at is storytelling,” says Bajaria. “So, it’s not always [true] for us that something like the F1 races are more valuable than Drive to Survive. Actually, Drive to Survive is the core—that is what we do,” Bajaria says of the blockbuster show that has created billions in enterprise value for F1.

Whereas Netflix turned America onto this global sport, her 10-year, $5 billion WWE deal attempted the opposite: “It was [being broadcast] in lots of different places, but it hadn’t been globally distributed in that way, and so that was a particular opportunity.”

At Netflix, carefully delivering content for everyone, in various formats, in global markets has been metaphorically referenced as “the gourmet cheeseburger” concept. “It wasn’t, ‘Okay, we need to do this and get it out,’” recalls soccer icon David Beckham of the four-part Netflix documentary about his life and career directed by Fisher Stevens. “It was all about when it’s ready because there were so many elements of it that we needed to get right.” In the end, the series won an Emmy, topped the charts in 32 countries and inspired a three-part series about his wife, former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham. Cheeseburgers that tempt every palate, after all, are hard to find.

So what could be expected from a combined entity of Netflix and Warner Bros. under Bajaria’s lead? Expect more of the same with movie releases in theaters and licensing of its television shows—with less disruption afoot as Netflix doesn’t currently own a major studio.

But Bajaria’s not waiting. This year, Netflix entered a partnership with Spotify to stream select video podcasts from Spotify Studios and The Ringer in early 2026. And iHeartMedia is reportedly in talks to license some or all of its video podcasts to Netflix, making it a direct competitor to YouTube, which currently drives more than one billion video podcasting views per month.

As Bajaria climbs higher on the Forbes World’s Most Powerful Women’s List, she continues to exhibit a high risk tolerance. Sitting backstage at the premiere for the You series finale at the iconic Paris Theater in New York City last April, she was clearly in her element as we discussed how she acquired the project’s global rights, ran it as a Netflix original outside the U.S. and subsequently launched it as a global original when Lifetime decided not to move forward after season one. And with that, she walked onstage. Hollywood, you’ve been warned.

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