On November 24, 2014, at approximately 7 a.m. Pacific time, employees of Sony Pictures Entertainment in Culver City logged on to find their screens replaced by the sound of gunfire, scrolling threats, and the image of a fiery skeleton looming over the miniaturized, zombified heads of the studio's top two executives. Before Sony's IT staff could sever the network, malware had already leapt from machine to machine across continents, wiping everything stored on 3,262 of the company's 6,797 personal computers and 837 of its 1,555 servers. It was, at that moment, the most devastating corporate cyberattack in history — a digital Pearl Harbor visited upon a company that had, almost exactly seven decades earlier, risen from the literal ashes of the first one.
Three weeks before the attack, a four-man team from a small Silicon Valley threat-intelligence firm had walked through the unlocked first-floor offices of Sony Pictures' information security department, found no receptionist, no security guard, and no human being at all — just cubicles with unattended computers logged into the company's global data network. "Basically the janitor can walk straight into their Info Sec department," the firm's co-founder later said. The visitors waited fifteen minutes before anyone appeared.
This is the paradox that has defined Sony for nearly eighty years: a company of relentless, almost metaphysical inventiveness — the firm that gave the world the transistor radio, the Trinitron, the Walkman, the compact disc, the PlayStation — perpetually undermined by the structural consequences of its own ambitions. A company that sees the future with preternatural clarity and then, with disturbing regularity, fails to protect or capitalize on what it has seen. The hack wasn't a bug. It was the architecture.
By the Numbers
Sony Group Corporation
¥13.0TRevenue, FY2024 (~$87B USD)
¥1.2TOperating income, FY2024 (~$8B USD)
~113,000Employees worldwide
$115B+Market capitalization (mid-2025)
155M+PlayStation 2 units sold (all-time record)
6Major business segments
79Years since founding
The Bombed-Out Department Store
The company that would become Sony was born on May 7, 1946, in a fire-scorched building in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo, with capital of roughly ¥190,000 — about $500 at the postwar exchange rate. Its founders could not have been more different in temperament or more complementary in function.
Masaru Ibuka was an engineer's engineer, a man who had earned the nickname "genius inventor" at Waseda University's School of Science and Engineering and who, by war's end, was running a radio repair shop amid rubble. He possessed the quality most dangerous to a balance sheet and most essential to an empire: a compulsive need to make things that hadn't existed before. Ibuka thought, as Sony president Nobuyuki Idei would later reflect, "in broad terms of how these products could enhance people's lives and cultures." He was not interested in copying. He was interested in creating.
Akio Morita was born in 1921 in Nagoya, the eldest son of a family that had brewed sake for fifteen generations. He was heir to a fortune and chose to walk away from it. Where Ibuka was the introvert obsessed with the artifact, Morita was the extrovert obsessed with the market — a born salesman with a physicist's education and an uncanny ability to read both Western and Eastern cultures and synthesize them into something neither could have produced alone. Together they founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. — the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation — a name so clunky and unpronounceable in English that it would itself become a strategic liability demanding resolution.
Their first real product was Japan's first tape recorder, the Type-G. It was heavy, expensive, and nearly impossible to sell. But it established the founding principle: Sony would not be a contract manufacturer or a copyist. It would make things no one had asked for and then convince them they couldn't live without.
Akio Morita's memoir,
Made in Japan, captures this ethos with a directness that reads less like corporate autobiography than manifesto. The book remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand why Sony's culture produces both miracles and catastrophes — often in the same decade.
The Transistor, the Radio, and the Name
In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled to the United States and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor. What happened next is one of the most consequential licensing deals in industrial history, though it was treated at the time as an afterthought by the licensor. Ibuka convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his tiny Japanese company — this, barely a decade after the war, a testament to both Ibuka's persistence and the scientific community's post-Manhattan Project idealism about open knowledge.
The Americans saw the transistor as a military tool. Ibuka saw a radio.
I knew we needed a weapon to break through to the US market, and it had to be something different. Something that nobody else was making.
Texas Instruments and Regency may have built a transistor radio first — the Regency TR-1, released in 1954, holds that claim. But it was a gimmick, a proof of concept with poor reception and a $49.95 price tag. Ibuka's company invested in the transistor radio as a viable commercial product — a distinction that sounds minor and is in fact everything. They didn't just build it. They manufactured it at scale, priced it for consumers, and marketed it internationally. Within a few years, they had taken over the market entirely.
But they needed a name. "Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K." was not going to work on a pocket radio sold in Los Angeles. Morita and Ibuka settled on "Sony" — a fusion of "sonus," the Latin word for sound, and "sonny," the English slang for young men, which had been adopted into Japanese street culture to describe the hip, cosmopolitan boys of postwar Tokyo. The name was short, meaningless in any specific language, and instantly memorable in all of them. It was, in retrospect, one of the earliest exercises in global branding — years before that concept had a name.
Sony quickly followed the transistor radio with the world's first transistorized television set, then a string of innovations that collectively rewired how human beings consumed media. Each product followed the same pattern: identify a latent consumer desire that no one had articulated, solve the engineering problem required to fulfill it, then create the market through sheer force of demonstration.
The Golden Era: Trinitron, Betamax, and the Walkman
From the mid-1960s through the late 1980s, Sony operated at a level of inventive consistency that has few parallels in corporate history. The Trinitron color television, introduced in 1968, used a single-gun, three-beam tube that produced a brighter, sharper picture than any competitor. It became the standard by which all televisions were measured for over two decades and generated margins that funded everything else.
Then came Betamax — and with it, the first of Sony's great strategic wounds, self-inflicted and instructive.
Betamax was, by nearly all technical accounts, the superior format: better picture quality, more compact cassettes, more elegant engineering. Sony introduced it in 1975. JVC, a subsidiary of Matsushita (later Panasonic), responded with VHS in 1976. VHS was technically inferior but offered a critical advantage — longer recording time, initially two hours versus Betamax's one, enough to record a feature film — and JVC aggressively licensed the format to other manufacturers. Sony, characteristically, kept Betamax proprietary.
The result was one of the most studied format wars in business history. VHS won not because it was better but because it was more open. By the early 1980s, Betamax was in retreat. Sony continued manufacturing Betamax machines until 2002, a stubbornness that was either admirable or pathological depending on your vantage point.
The lesson should have been clear: in platform markets, openness beats quality. Sony would spend the next four decades intermittently learning and forgetting this lesson.
But the Walkman — released in 1979 — demonstrated what Sony could do when engineering instinct aligned with cultural intuition. The device was Morita's personal obsession. He wanted to listen to music while walking around and couldn't understand why no one had built a device that allowed this. Engineers protested that a tape player without a recording function would confuse consumers. Morita overruled them. The first batch of 30,000 units reportedly sold out in the first month. By the time production ceased in 2010, Sony had sold over 200 million Walkman devices across multiple formats.
Sony's hyper-capable, slightly fussy gadgets were the clearest expression of a collective vision of a thrilling yet humane future. It was much more than just the Walkman and the Trinitron — everything the company made was of impeccable quality, satisfying to hold and intricately detailed in its functionality.
The Walkman didn't just sell hardware. It created the category of personal mobile entertainment — the idea that your soundtrack could travel with you, that the boundary between private experience and public space could be mediated by technology. Every iPod, every iPhone, every pair of AirPods is a descendant.
The Content Leap
In 1988, Sony did something that no Japanese electronics company had ever done and that most analysts considered insane: it bought CBS Records for $2 billion. The following year, it acquired Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.4 billion. In two years, the world's premier hardware company had acquired two of America's most storied content libraries.
The logic, as articulated by Morita and then-CEO Norio Ohga — a former opera singer turned executive, a man whose aesthetic sensibility infused Sony's product design for decades — was that hardware without software was a beautiful engine with no fuel. The Betamax debacle had demonstrated that controlling the format was insufficient if you didn't control the content that ran on it. By owning both the pipeline and the programming, Sony would never again be at the mercy of third-party content decisions.
It was a visionary thesis. It was also, in execution, a catastrophe — at least initially.
Columbia Pictures hemorrhaged money in the early 1990s. Sony wrote down $3.2 billion on the studio in 1994, one of the largest corporate write-offs in history at that point. The culture clash between Tokyo and Hollywood was brutal and well-documented. John Nathan's
Sony: The Private Life provides a forensic account of the dysfunction — the revolving-door executives, the spending excesses, the fundamental misunderstanding between a company that prized engineering discipline and an industry that ran on creative chaos and relationship politics.
And yet. The thesis was correct. It was just twenty years early. By the 2010s, Sony Pictures and Sony Music would become two of the most valuable pieces of the Sony empire — not because they generated the highest margins, but because they provided the content gravity that made everything else cohere. The Betamax lesson, internalized at enormous cost, had quietly become Sony's most durable strategic asset.
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Sony's Content Acquisitions
The vertical integration bet
1989Acquires Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola for $3.4 billion, gaining Columbia and TriStar studios.
1994Writes down $3.2 billion on Columbia Pictures — the largest corporate write-off to date.
2004Forms Sony BMG joint venture, merging Sony Music with Bertelsmann's BMG.
2008Acquires Bertelsmann's 50% stake in Sony BMG for $1.2 billion, gaining full control.
2016Acquires Michael Jackson estate's 50% share in Sony/ATV Music Publishing for $750 million.
2018Acquires additional EMI Music Publishing stake for ~$2.3 billion, becoming world's largest music publisher.
The Playstation Insurgency
The story of how Sony entered the video game business is, in miniature, the story of why Sony exists at all — a combination of wounded pride, engineering ambition, and the willingness to destroy a partnership rather than accept a subordinate role.
In the late 1980s, Sony and Nintendo were collaborating on a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The project, internally code-named the "Play Station," was supposed to give Nintendo access to the vastly greater storage capacity of CDs while giving Sony a foothold in gaming. In June 1991, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Sony announced the partnership. The next morning — literally the next morning — Nintendo announced it was abandoning the Sony deal and partnering with Philips instead. It was a public humiliation orchestrated with breathtaking deliberateness.
Ken Kutaragi, the Sony engineer who had championed the Nintendo collaboration, was furious. Kutaragi was a difficult, brilliant, abrasive figure — "the father of PlayStation," as he would become known — who had initially gotten in trouble at Sony for moonlighting on a sound chip for the Super Nintendo without authorization. He was the kind of engineer who terrified middle management and electrified top leadership. When the Nintendo deal collapsed, Kutaragi persuaded Sony's board to enter the console market independently.
I think from the beginning, the company knew just being a tech company wasn't enough. You had to bring some secret sauce in from the entertainment world.
The original PlayStation launched in Japan on December 3, 1994, and in the United States on September 9, 1995, priced at $299 — $100 less than the Sega Saturn. It entered a market with two entrenched incumbents, Nintendo and Sega, both of whom had decades of dominance and extensive developer relationships. Sony had none of this.
What Sony had was the CD-ROM, which offered dramatically more storage than cartridges; a licensing model that was far more developer-friendly than Nintendo's notoriously restrictive terms; and an understanding — drawn directly from its music and film businesses — that the console was a platform and games were content, and the platform's value was a function of the content ecosystem it could attract. Sony courted third-party developers with a zeal and a generosity that Nintendo, accustomed to its feudal relationship with studios, simply could not match.
Jim Ryan, who joined Sony Interactive Entertainment in 1994 — the same year the PlayStation launched — and would eventually become its president and CEO, later reflected: "Before the launch, there was considerable uncertainty. We were moving into a space that had two pretty entrenched occupants, Nintendo and Sega."
The uncertainty evaporated quickly. The PlayStation sold over 100 million units. It created a gaming culture in markets where none had existed — southern Europe, the Middle East, parts of South America. It made gaming cool in a way that Nintendo's family-friendly image and Sega's try-hard attitude never quite had.
PS2: The Machine That Ate the Living Room
The PlayStation 2, released in 2000, remains the best-selling video game console in history: over 155 million units sold, a number that no subsequent console has approached. It was a DVD player that happened to play games — or a game console that happened to play DVDs — and this dual identity was the point. Sony priced the PS2 at $299, roughly the same as a standalone DVD player at the time, which meant that millions of consumers bought it as their first DVD player and discovered gaming as a side effect. It was a Trojan horse for an entire entertainment ecosystem.
The PS2's dominance funded Sony's expansion into online gaming, into first-party studio development, into the creation of an integrated entertainment platform that would, over the next two decades, become the center of gravity for the entire company.
And then Sony did what Sony does. It forgot its own lessons.
The Lost Decade
The PlayStation 3, launched in November 2006, was priced at $499 for the base model and $599 for the premium — roughly twice the cost of the Xbox 360, which Microsoft had released a full year earlier. The PS3 used the Cell processor, a massively ambitious piece of custom silicon co-developed with IBM and Toshiba that was designed to deliver supercomputer-level performance. It was a technical marvel. It was also a nightmare for developers, who found the Cell architecture fiendishly difficult to program for, which meant that cross-platform games often looked and ran worse on the PS3 than on the 360 — the exact opposite of what the premium price should have delivered.
Sony was playing the Betamax game again: superior proprietary technology, insufficient ecosystem support, and a price point that reflected the company's opinion of its own engineering rather than the consumer's willingness to pay. The PS3 also included a Blu-ray player, which Sony had positioned as the successor to DVD in its format war against Toshiba's HD DVD. Blu-ray won that war — but the victory was pyrrhic, because the cost of including the Blu-ray drive was a major factor in the PS3's devastating price premium.
Microsoft's Xbox 360, with its year-long head start, its more developer-friendly architecture, and its vastly superior online service in Xbox Live, ate into Sony's market share with an aggression that would have been unthinkable during the PS2 era. By the end of the generation, the PS3 and Xbox 360 had each sold roughly 80 million-plus units — a statistical tie that masked the fact that Sony had gone from 70%+ market share with the PS2 to roughly 50%, a collapse in relative position even if the absolute numbers held.
The rot was not confined to gaming. This was Sony's lost decade across the board. The company's television business, once defined by the Trinitron's dominance, was being demolished by Samsung and LG, whose investments in LCD and then OLED technology had leapfrogged Sony's proprietary approaches. The Walkman had been obliterated by Apple's iPod — a product that did exactly what the Walkman had done (create a personal music ecosystem) but in the digital domain, with an integrated software store that Sony, despite owning a record label, had been unable or unwilling to build. The e-reader business, where Sony had beaten Amazon to market with the Sony Reader, was annihilated by the Kindle because Sony couldn't match Amazon's content ecosystem or its willingness to subsidize hardware.
Howard Stringer, who in 2005 became the first non-Japanese CEO in Sony's history, told a press conference in 2009: "We feel we're riding to the rescue of news" — this about a partnership with Dow Jones to deliver Wall Street Journal subscriptions on the Sony Reader. It was a statement of almost touching irrelevance. Amazon had already won. Apple was about to release the iPad.
The fundamental problem was structural. Sony's business units — electronics, gaming, music, film, financial services — operated as autonomous fiefdoms with minimal coordination and, in many cases, active hostility toward one another. The music division wouldn't cooperate with the electronics division on digital distribution because it feared cannibalization. The electronics division wouldn't standardize on open formats because it wanted to protect proprietary technologies. The film studio operated as if it were located not in Culver City but on a separate planet. Each division optimized locally and the company suffered globally.
It was the anti-Apple. Where
Steve Jobs had built a vertically integrated machine in which hardware, software, and services reinforced one another through a single design vision, Sony had all the same pieces — hardware, content, software, distribution — and couldn't get them to talk to each other.
Kaz Hirai and the Architecture of Recovery
Kazuo Hirai became CEO in April 2012, inheriting a company that had posted losses in four consecutive years. Sony's stock price had declined roughly 80% from its 2000 peak. The company's credit rating had been cut to near-junk. Hirai was a career Sony lifer — born in Tokyo, raised partly in the United States and Canada, educated at International Christian University — who had run the PlayStation business and understood, from direct experience, what Sony looked like when it worked.
His diagnosis was simple and devastating: Sony had too many businesses, many of which were subscale, and the company had lost its ability to make decisions. Hirai introduced what he called the "One Sony" strategy — a phrase that sounded like corporate banality but represented a genuine rupture with the decentralized feudalism that had prevailed for decades. He divested the VAIO personal computer business. He spun off the television division into a standalone subsidiary. He sold the battery business to Murata Manufacturing. He reduced headcount.
But Hirai's most consequential decision was also his most counterintuitive: rather than retreating to a single business, he identified three "pillars" — gaming, imaging/sensors, and entertainment (music and film) — and declared that these would define Sony's future. He was betting that Sony's advantage lay not in any single product category but in the intersection of hardware, content, and technology — the same thesis Morita had articulated in 1988 with the CBS Records acquisition, but this time with a corporate structure capable of actually executing it.
The PlayStation 4, launched in November 2013, was the first evidence that the new architecture could work. Priced at $399 — $100 less than the Xbox One — it used a standard x86 architecture that developers loved, it prioritized gaming over the media-hub pretensions that Microsoft had burdened the Xbox One with, and it sold over 117 million units, restoring Sony's dominance in the console market.
Hirai stepped down as CEO in April 2018, handing the role to Kenichiro Yoshida, the company's CFO. By then, Sony's stock price had roughly quintupled from its 2012 nadir. The company was profitable again. The pillars were holding.
The Sensor Empire
If PlayStation is Sony's most famous business, its image sensor division may be its most strategically important — the unit that best illustrates what Sony does when it gets the engineering-to-market pipeline right.
Sony's semiconductor division, centered on CMOS image sensors, commands approximately 44% of the global image sensor market by revenue, a position so dominant that it is closer to a utility than a competitive business. When you take a photo on an iPhone, an Android flagship, a Tesla camera, a drone, or most professional mirrorless cameras, the odds are roughly even that the sensor capturing that image was designed and manufactured by Sony. Apple, Sony's largest sensor customer, depends on Sony semiconductors for every iPhone camera module.
The unit's origins trace back to Sony's long history in imaging — CCD sensors for camcorders and Handycam devices — but the current dominance was built through sustained R&D investment during the lost decade, when other companies were retrenching. Sony's engineers developed stacked CMOS sensor architectures and backside illumination technology that offered superior low-light performance, faster readout speeds, and greater pixel density than anything competitors could offer.
This is a rare example of a business where Sony's instinct for proprietary technology actually works — because sensors are components, not platforms. There is no format war to lose. The switching costs for a smartphone manufacturer to change sensor suppliers are enormous (multi-year design cycles, custom calibration, firmware integration), and the performance gap between Sony's top-tier sensors and alternatives from Samsung LSI or OmniVision remains significant.
The business generates operating margins above 10% even in cyclical downturns and approaches 20% in strong years. It is, in the language of competitive strategy, a counter-positioned asset — Sony invested heavily in custom fabrication capacity when competitors were chasing commoditized chips, and the resulting quality gap has proven extremely difficult to close.
The Music Machine
Sony Music Entertainment is a quieter triumph. Through a series of acquisitions — the 2008 buyout of Bertelsmann's stake in Sony BMG, the 2016 acquisition of the Michael Jackson estate's share of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the 2018 purchase of a controlling stake in EMI Music Publishing for approximately $2.3 billion — Sony assembled the world's largest music publishing operation and one of the three dominant recorded-music labels.
The timing was almost absurdly fortunate. Sony was consolidating its music holdings at precisely the moment that streaming was re-inflating the music industry after fifteen years of piracy-driven decline. Global recorded music revenue bottomed in 2014 at roughly $14 billion and has since recovered to over $28 billion, driven overwhelmingly by streaming subscriptions. Sony Music's revenue has grown accordingly, and because music publishing and master recordings are essentially perpetual royalty streams, the margins on catalogue music are extraordinary — variable costs approach zero once the recording exists.
Music has become Sony's highest-margin operating business and its most reliable source of free cash flow. It is also, structurally, the most defensible: there are only three major labels (Sony, Universal, Warner), the barriers to entry are nearly absolute (you cannot reproduce seventy years of accumulated catalogue), and the shift to streaming has actually increased the value of back-catalogue because algorithmic playlists surface old music alongside new.
The PS5 Era and the Microsoft Problem
The PlayStation 5, launched in November 2020 amid pandemic-driven demand and semiconductor shortages, has sold over 60 million units through early 2025. It is a successful console by any historical measure, but it operates in a competitive environment that has shifted beneath Sony's feet.
Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, completed in October 2023, was the largest deal in gaming history and represented an existential challenge to Sony's model. Activision's Call of Duty franchise alone generates billions in annual revenue and has been a cornerstone of PlayStation's attach rate for two decades. The fear — which Sony lobbied regulators aggressively to amplify — was that Microsoft would make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox, destroying Sony's competitive position in one stroke.
That hasn't happened, at least not yet. Microsoft committed to keeping Call of Duty on PlayStation for at least ten years as a condition of regulatory approval. But the strategic landscape has fundamentally changed. Microsoft now owns studios responsible for Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Halo, and Minecraft — a content library that dwarfs Sony's first-party holdings.
Sony's response has been multi-pronged: investing in first-party exclusives (Insomniac's Spider-Man franchise, Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, Guerrilla's Horizon series), expanding PlayStation to PC to capture a wider audience, building out PlayStation Plus as a subscription service, and acquiring studios like Bungie (the Destiny developer, acquired for $3.6 billion in 2022).
But the console business is under strain. In February 2024, Sony lowered its PS5 sales forecast by 16% — from 25 million to 21 million units — citing weaker-than-expected holiday demand. It laid off 900 workers, or 8% of its PlayStation division, and closed its London Studio entirely. The PSVR2 virtual reality headset, a technically accomplished device, has been dramatically outsold by Meta's Quest headsets.
After careful consideration and many leadership discussions over several months, it has become clear changes need to be made to continue to grow the business and develop the company. This will be painful.
The gaming business remains Sony's largest revenue segment and its most culturally prominent. But the question it faces is whether the traditional console model — a proprietary box, exclusive games, a closed ecosystem — can sustain its economics against Microsoft's willingness to subsidize hardware through Game Pass subscriptions and cloud gaming, against Nintendo's willingness to compete in a completely orthogonal dimension (the Switch 2, expected in 2025, prioritizes portability and whimsy over raw power), and against the broader shift toward mobile and free-to-play gaming that pulls engagement away from the living room entirely.
The Tariff Wall and the Conglomerate Question
In May 2025, Sony forecast a ¥100 billion (~$680 million) hit to profits from U.S. tariffs, and in April 2025 announced PS5 price increases across multiple markets — a "tough decision," the company called it, that underscored the physical-goods vulnerability of a company that still manufactures tens of millions of consumer electronics units annually.
Under CEO Kenichiro Yoshida, who has led the company since 2018, Sony has been reorganizing itself around the concept of "creative entertainment" — a framing that deliberately de-emphasizes the consumer electronics heritage in favor of the content, gaming, music, and imaging businesses that generate higher margins and more durable competitive advantages. In 2021, the parent company was renamed Sony Group Corporation, with each major business becoming a standalone subsidiary. The corporate structure now resembles a holding company more than an integrated manufacturer — a Japanese Berkshire Hathaway of entertainment and technology, each subsidiary run with significant autonomy but under a corporate umbrella that allocates capital and manages the portfolio.
The Kadokawa investment — Sony acquired a 10% stake in the Japanese media conglomerate behind Elden Ring developer FromSoftware for $320 million in December 2024 — signals where Yoshida's Sony is headed: deeper into the intersection of gaming, anime, publishing, and IP licensing that constitutes Japan's most valuable cultural export. The bet is not on hardware, not on any single format, but on creative intellectual property that can be monetized across every screen and every platform.
It is a bet Akio Morita would have recognized. Make the content, own the content, control its distribution. The execution has been uneven across eight decades. The thesis has never wavered.
The Skeleton on the Screen
Return, for a moment, to that morning in November 2014. The hack that devastated Sony Pictures exposed not just cybersecurity failures but the internal communications of an entire studio — executive emails revealing salary disparities, racially insensitive jokes, strategic plans, private feuds, and the full unvarnished mechanics of how Hollywood actually works. It was an act of digital violence that nearly brought down a studio and became a geopolitical incident when the U.S. government attributed the attack to North Korea in retaliation for The Interview.
Sony rebuilt. Sony Pictures went on to release Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It released Spider-Man: No Way Home, which grossed $1.9 billion worldwide. It licensed KPop Demon Hunters to Netflix in a pandemic-era safety play — and the film became Netflix's biggest movie ever.
The pattern is the point. Sony gets knocked down with a violence and a regularity that would destroy most companies. It gets back up because it possesses something that cannot be hacked, cannot be undercut by a format war, cannot be competed away by a company with a bigger balance sheet: the accumulated institutional knowledge of how to make things that move people. A transistor radio small enough for a shirt pocket. A personal stereo that changed the relationship between human beings and public space. A game console that turned a generation into gamers. A sensor that captures light with more fidelity than the human eye.
In a bombed-out department store in Tokyo in 1946, two men with $500 decided to make things that hadn't existed before. Nearly eighty years later, the fiery skeleton on the screen faded, and the company that rose from an earlier set of ashes went back to work.
