Welcome to the Wall Street Week newsletter, bringing you stories of capitalism about things you need to know, but even more things you need to think about. I'm David Westin, and this week we told stories of Covid-19 pandemic five years after its onset and of Reed Hastings' second act after Netflix. If you're not yet a subscriber, sign up here for this newsletter.

Five Years Later

Five years ago this week, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a "pandemic." Those of us in New York remember too well the overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, the empty streets, the confinement to our homes. It seemed at the time that life would never be the same.

But were we right?                                                                         

Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok says the economy has "now crawled out of that difference and we now have reached another world, which is not a linear development from where we came from."

Not all countries responded to the pandemic the way the US did. Sweden, for example, didn't impose a general lockdown, but instead relied more on voluntary measures such as recommending masks on public transit. Johan Norberg, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said the results weren't nearly as bad as some had predicted.

Two of the sectors hit the hardest in the US were health care and travel. Travel has bounced back nicely, but Charity Dean, who was on the front lines of the pandemic five years ago, says the health care industry didn't come out nearly as well.

Après Netflix

Life as the CEO of a major publicly traded company is consuming. It comes with big rewards, but imposes unrelenting demand from boards, shareholders, employees, customers — and increasingly, the government. So what does a person do when the CEO music stops?

For some, simply traveling and playing golf doesn't do the trick. Bill Swanson went from 42 years at defense contractor Raytheon (10 as its CEO) to owning and operating a vineyard in California's Edna Valley. Everything he learned at Raytheon as an engineer to wine making, he said. 

The big difference? "For 42 plus years, I worked for the shareholders," whereas the vineyard "is my brand. It's something that we own, and it's something that I have the ability to give back and provide a life and security to 30 or 35 people here, or produce a product that people enjoy."

Reed Hastings took a decidedly different path to his second act after co-founding Netflix and leading it as CEO for 23 years. His love of skiing conflicted with his aversion to crowds on the ski slopes. So, he bought a mountain in Utah, and has undertaken a major real estate development project adding to an existing public ski resort a bespoke, private version for the skiing elite.

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