George Hotz: An iPhone Unlock, a Sony Lawsuit and comma.ai

George Hotz was 17 when he became the first person to free an iPhone from AT&T, and he celebrated by trading the phone for a Nissan 350Z.

That was the summer of 2007. In the two decades since, the hacker known as geohot has cracked the PlayStation 3, been sued by Sony, collected a $150,000 bounty from Google, built a self-driving car in his garage and started a company to take on Nvidia.

He's also quit nearly every job he's ever had, usually in public. The pattern is the point: Hotz wins the fights he picks, and then picks a bigger one.

George Hotz at a Glance

• Born in 1989 in Glen Rock, New Jersey, Hotz went to the Bergen County Academies and won $20,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for a homemade "holodeck."
• In August 2007, at 17, he announced the first iPhone carrier unlock, a hack that needed both software and a soldering iron. A phone-repair company gave him a Nissan 350Z and three iPhones for his handiwork.
• He released the iPhone jailbreaks blackra1n in 2009 and limera1n in 2010, then turned to the PlayStation 3 and published its secret signing keys in January 2011.
• Sony sued him nine days later. The case ended in April 2011 with a settlement and a permanent injunction keeping him away from Sony products.
• Facebook hired him in 2011; he left within a year. In 2014 he chained four Chrome OS bugs at Google's Pwnium contest for a $150,000 prize, and Google hired him for Project Zero.
• In September 2015 he founded comma.ai, and that December Bloomberg showed the world his self-driving Acura. Tesla publicly disputed his account of a job offer from Elon Musk.
• Federal regulators scared him off selling the $999 comma one in 2016, so he open-sourced the software instead. Consumer Reports ranked it ahead of Tesla Autopilot in 2020.
• In late 2022 he stepped back from comma.ai, did a five-week stint at Twitter under Elon Musk and founded the tiny corp to build cheap AI hardware. He's still its CEO.

The Life of George Hotz

Hotz's Early Years

George Francis Hotz was born in 1989 and grew up in Glen Rock, New Jersey, a commuter town a half hour from Manhattan. He attended the Bergen County Academies, a magnet high school where he was the kind of student who entered science fairs with a simulated-reality machine.

That project, a homemade "holodeck" inspired by Star Trek, won him $20,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Forbes named him one of five junior innovators to watch.

He had the résumé of a kid headed for a quiet research career. Then Apple released a phone.

The $600 Phone and the Sports Car

The original iPhone went on sale in June 2007 locked to AT&T. Hotz, 17 and bored over the summer, decided to fix that.

The "Hotz hack," as the press called it, was no software trick. It required opening the phone, soldering a wire to the baseband chip to change a voltage, and then running custom code. An Associated Press reporter watched him drop a T-Mobile SIM card into an unlocked iPhone and make a call.

He announced it on his blog in late August, and within days he was on CNBC, NBC's Today show and the front page of The New York Times. Terry Daidone, founder of the Kentucky phone-repair company CertiCell, traded him a Nissan 350Z and three 8 GB iPhones for one of his unlocked units.

"This has been a great end to a great summer," Hotz wrote. That fall he enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a biotechnology major. College didn't take; he left RIT, tried Carnegie Mellon, and left that too.

Jailbreaks and a Retirement That Didn't Last

Hotz stayed in the iPhone scene for three more years. His blackra1n jailbreak arrived in October 2009, and in July 2010 he announced he was retiring from jailbreaking.

The retirement lasted about three months. On October 9, 2010, he dropped limera1n, built on a boot ROM exploit he'd found and kept quiet, releasing it the day before a rival team's tool was due. Fellow hackers grumbled that he'd burned two exploits at once; users had an untethered jailbreak for every iOS 4.1 device.

By then he'd already moved on to a harder target.

Hacking the PlayStation 3

The PlayStation 3 had gone more than three years without a hack, which Hotz took as a challenge. In December 2009 he announced his intention, and on January 22, 2010, he said he had read and write access to system memory and control of the hypervisor.

Four days later he published the exploit, hoping it'd "ignite the scene." Sony's response was to lock the console down harder.

In late December 2010 the hacker group fail0verflow showed at the Chaos Communication Congress that Sony had botched its cryptographic signing. Hotz followed up on January 2, 2011, by posting the console's root signing keys on his website under the heading "keys open doors," and on January 7 he put up a video demonstrating a jailbreak for firmware 3.55.

Sony v. Hotz

Sony Computer Entertainment America sued on January 11, 2011, in federal court in San Francisco, naming Hotz, two fail0verflow members and 100 unnamed defendants. The complaint alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, among other claims.

On January 27 the court granted a temporary restraining order that barred Hotz from circumventing the PS3's protections and ordered him to hand his computers to Sony's lawyers. Sony also won subpoenas for his PayPal, YouTube, Twitter and Google records, including a list of everyone who'd watched his video.

Hotz, 21, argued that a New Jersey resident shouldn't be hauled into a California court and raised money for his defense online. On March 31 the two sides signed a confidential settlement, and on April 11, 2011, Judge Susan Illston entered a final judgment and permanent injunction by consent. Each side paid its own costs.

"It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier," Hotz said. He's stayed away from Sony hardware ever since.

Facebook, Google and $150,000

Weeks after the settlement, Facebook hired him. He started in May 2011 and was gone by January 2012.

In March 2014 he showed up at Google's Pwnium contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver and chained four vulnerabilities to take over a Chromebook, earning the top prize of $150,000. Chris Evans, who was assembling Google's new Project Zero bug-hunting team, offered him a job. Hotz joined that July.

He didn't stay long there either. By 2015 he was in a garage in San Francisco, bolting cameras and a computer to an Acura ILX.

The Garage Car

Hotz founded comma.ai in September 2015. In December, Bloomberg Businessweek's Ashlee Vance rode along in the Acura, which Hotz said he'd taught to drive itself in about a month using neural networks trained on his own driving.

The story reported that Elon Musk had offered Hotz a multimillion-dollar bonus to build a system that'd replace Mobileye's technology in Teslas. Tesla posted a correction on its homepage: "We think it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles."

Hotz raised money from Andreessen Horowitz anyway. At TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2016, he unveiled the comma one, a $999 dashboard box that'd give ordinary Hondas and Acuras something like Tesla's Autopilot.

The Letter From Washington

On October 27, 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent comma.ai a special order demanding details on how the comma one worked and how it kept drivers safe, with civil penalties of up to $21,000 a day for missing the November 10 deadline.

Hotz's answer came by tweet the next day: "The comma one is cancelled. comma.ai will be exploring other products and markets. Hello from Shenzhen, China."

Instead of a product, comma.ai gave away the software. On November 30, 2016, it published openpilot on GitHub as open source, offered for research with no warranty. Hardware followed later as "devkits," and in November 2020 Consumer Reports ranked openpilot on the comma two above every driver-assistance system it tested, including GM's Super Cruise and Tesla's Autopilot.

Wartime Only

In November 2022, Hotz announced he was stepping away from comma.ai's daily work while remaining president and sole board member. "I'm good at things when it's wartime," he said. "I'm not so good at hands-on, ok, let's patiently scale this up."

Days later he joined Twitter as an intern after Elon Musk's takeover, asking only for the cost of living in San Francisco, with a brief to fix search and the login pop-up. He resigned on December 20, 2022, after about five weeks.

"Didn't think there was any real impact I could make there," he wrote. "It was sad to see my GitHub withering. Back to coding!"

In May 2023 he announced the tiny corp, which raised about $5 million to build tinygrad, a deep-learning framework he'd started in 2020, and the tinybox, a $15,000 workstation stuffed with consumer AMD GPUs. The mission statement is three words: commoditize the petaflop.

George Hotz: Still Picking Fights

Hotz's career reads like a list of institutions he decided were beatable: AT&T, Sony, Google's Chrome team, Tesla, federal regulators, Nvidia. He hasn't won all of them, but he's never lost quietly.

In 2026 he's CEO of the tiny corp, which now sells tinyboxes built on Nvidia's Blackwell chips as well as AMD parts and is taking preorders for a rack it calls the exabox. comma.ai, the company he still presides over, launched the $999 comma four in November 2025 and says its devices have driven more than 400 million miles across 350-plus car models.

The 350Z is long gone. The habit of trading the safe thing for the interesting one never left.