The Teenager Who Beat Apple, Sony, and Elon Musk

Hackers: Code & Chaos | National Media Archive

There’s something thrilling about watching a kid stare down a billion-dollar corporation and win. It’s the kind of story Silicon Valley pretends to celebrate—until it doesn’t.

This episodes is part of the National Media Archive.

Before it became a badge of honor to disrupt, before venture-backed startups turned words like “hacker” into corporate slogans, there was a teenager in New Jersey with a screwdriver, a guitar pick, and an idea. His name was George Hotz, and when the iPhone launched—locked tight in a walled garden called AT&T—he decided that wasn’t good enough. Seventeen years old, full of obsession and caffeine, he cracked it wide open.

It wasn’t just about making a phone work on T-Mobile. It was about telling a machine that it no longer belonged to the company that made it. It belonged to the person who bought it. To do that, George found the chip that told the iPhone who it could talk to—Apple’s baseband processor—and soldered a wire directly onto it, scrambled its memory with voltage, and tricked it into thinking it had been erased. Then he fed it code until it bent to his will. The next morning, he walked into his parents’ kitchen and recorded a grainy video on a flip cam. “Hey everyone, I’m GeoHot,” he said, holding up the world’s first unlocked iPhone. That video exploded—millions of views, press coverage, and a myth was born.

The move wasn’t just technical. It was political. The act of jailbreaking showed users they could own the devices they paid for. It threatened the business model of giants like Apple, who sold phones cheap but locked them into monthly contracts. It cracked open a conversation about what ownership meant in a digital age. For George, this was just the beginning.

From a young age, George was the kind of kid who broke things to learn how they worked. Radios, TV remotes, anything with a circuit board. His father, a school computer teacher, shrugged it off. If this was how he learned, so be it. By middle school, George was building his own game consoles. By high school, he was building infrared mapping robots that landed him on science fair stages and even the Today Show. But school bored him. Rules bored him. He wanted to see what else he could do.

What he did next was take on Sony.

At the time, Sony’s PlayStation 3 was considered unhackable. A digital fortress. But to George, that was just another dare. He opened up the console with the same surgical curiosity he’d used on the iPhone. Beneath the plastic was a chip called the hypervisor—the digital bouncer that stopped users from doing anything Sony hadn’t explicitly allowed. Using voltage surges and over 500 lines of custom code, George made that chip blink a zero on screen. Zero meant root access. He now owned the PS3 in a way Sony never intended.

Sony freaked out.

They sued. Hard. Under laws meant to stop fraud, they said George had broken in where he didn’t belong, even though the device was his. But the lawsuit didn’t just rile up one teenager. It woke up the entire internet. Hacker groups, digital rights organizations, and legions of fans rallied behind him. Anonymous declared war on Sony. The story became bigger than George. It became a referendum on power.

All the while, George never claimed to be a saint. He just wanted to understand how things worked. That impulse—to dig into locked systems, to own the tools we use—drove him deeper into the world of machines, and eventually, into the heart of Silicon Valley.

But it also made him dangerous. To some, he was a hero. To others, a threat. And that tension—between curiosity and control, code and consequence—follows him to this day.