On a Monday morning in early March, Reed Hastings, the billionaire co-founder and former chief executive of Netflix, clicked into the bindings on his snowboard and started off down one of the slopes at Powder Mountain, a ski area in Utah’s north-east corner.

He quickly veered off the groomed trail into some well-spaced trees, and as he made turns over bumpy snow, you could hear his edges scratch against patches of ice. “Not as good as I was hoping,” he said at the bottom. “But still not bad.”