The Sony Hack | The Mistakes Series
Revisionist History
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 62K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
The former head of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, tells Malcolm about a time he made a really big mistake: greenlighting a film that would lead to an international incident.
You can learn more about Michael Lynton and Josh Steiner’s book, From Mistakes to Meaning, here.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:10.6 | On the morning of November 24, 2014, just a few days before Thanksgiving, Michael Linton |
| 0:17.7 | drove from his house in West Los Angeles to Culver City, the home of the sprawling |
| 0:23.2 | complex that houses Sony Pictures Entertainment. He was the CEO. He had been at Sony nearly 11 years. |
| 0:31.9 | The films were all going well. We had a bunch of stuff going really well on television, |
| 0:36.5 | Breaking Bad and Blacklist and things like that. |
| 0:39.4 | The music company also was having a very good year, so everything seemed to be on a steady pace. |
| 0:44.7 | He turned on to Bundy from San Vicente Boulevard. |
| 0:48.8 | I was driving to work, and I get a phone call from our CFO, Dave Henler, and he said, Mike, all of our systems |
| 0:56.7 | are down. Nothing is working here at the studio. It appears like a bunch of our laptops have been |
| 1:02.7 | fried and are unusable. They're actually broken. We do not, for the life of us, understand what's |
| 1:08.7 | happened. You arrived a few minutes later. |
| 1:11.4 | The studio is a lot like a college campus. |
| 1:14.1 | It's like five or seven thousand people. |
| 1:17.4 | Half of them are employees. |
| 1:18.8 | But as a result of you all sitting in that one space, word travels very fast. |
| 1:25.1 | And by the time I drove up, there were crowds already in front of the building. |
| 1:29.3 | Like, what's going on? |
| 1:30.6 | What's happening? |
| 1:31.3 | What's happening? |
| 1:33.1 | The entire Sony Pictures operation had been hacked. |
| 1:36.4 | And whoever had done it |
... |
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