George "geohot" Hotz is working on a self-driving car.
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Some hackers just won’t go away — to the annoyance of big tech companies

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

George “geohot” Hotz just won’t go away, and big tech corporations are very likely annoyed about that. It shows that young hackers can grow up to be slightly older hackers who are still thorns in the sides of the establishment.

The 26-year-old hacker came back into the news this week as he unveiled a self-driving car built with off-the-shelf parts and his own custom software. A Bloomberg writer, Ashlee Vance, confirmed that the car drove itself on the I-280 freeway in the Bay Area. Tesla got a little testy and issued a statement to correct some of the impressions from the interview.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.