Revisionist History: The Staten Island Problem · 2026-04-16 · 32 min · 5,580 words

The Sony Hack | The Mistakes Series

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio

Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us and listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians, and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY. Pushkin. On the morning of November 24, 2014, just a few days before Thanksgiving, Michael Linton drove from his house in West Los Angeles to Culver City, the home of the sprawling complex that houses Sony Pictures Entertainment.

He was the CEO. He had been at Sony nearly 11 years. The films were all going well. The we had a bunch of stuff going really well on television, Breaking Bad and Blacklist and things like that. The the music company also was having a very good year, so everything seemed to be on a steady pace.

He turned on to Bundy from San Vicente Boulevard. I was driving to work and I get a phone call from our CFO, Dave Hendler, and he said, Mike, all of our systems are down. Nothing is working here at the studio. It appears like a bunch of our laptops have been fried and are unusable. They're actually broken and we we do not for the life of us understand what's happened.

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