As one of many who has seen him doing his thing alongside others, yeah he’d think that. And he’d be right.
If he thinks like that (I don’t know him), he needs to limit the scope of what he works on to projects he can accomplish completely on his own.
Does this mean everything he does or says is right? absolutely not, sometimes its myopic and tunnel-vision induced with a smidgen of good points hidden within. Does he come across as 'off' to some people? a slight god-complex? is he likely hardcore autistic and miss practically all social niceties? absolutely, obviously unverifiable, true.
He should have gone into Academia (not that he would have excelled at the 'school' side of it), and he still could, because I am sure in the future he will be an excellent eccentric and transformative professor or researcher, if he wasn't so caught up in the rat-race libertarian capitalistic technology scene.
With all that said, even though we align on many things here, I don't think he or myself could stand being in a room with each other for anything more than a few minutes.
I don’t know the guy, but if what the person replied to is correct about how he views himself and people who disagree with him, it doesn’t matter how good he is. You don’t want to be on a team with that. You don’t want to hire that guy. It’s not worth it. Let him make something on his own and sell it to you. Or let him grow up a bit.
how many times in history does this need to be disproven? some of the most insufferable assholes in human history were absolutely brilliant once-in-an-era types.
it's a chicken-or-egg question to ask whether or not the brilliance comes from the confidence or the other way around, but opinionated assholes that can't operate in traditional team settings have a proven track record of effectiveness in the world.
the trick isn't to ignore the brilliance, the trick is to find a handler or method that works to smooth the burden so that your organization can take advantage of the brilliance without self-destructing.
in fact, here's a rule of thumb. if any opinion anyone ever concludes with "Let's disconnect this human from society until they fix themselves" , well , I humbly disagree.
So you want to employ unreformed murderers, psychopaths, rapists etc. Or do you have a line somewhere?
Better question, are you fine with not hiring assholes who aren’t brilliant?
Key phrase in the quote was 'until they fix themselves', reformation by other means, particularly therapy (prisons are not therapy, and incredibly inefficient, which is why they have such a high recidivism rate). So, sure, we should employ *reformed* murderers, psychopaths, etc. As long as they have had adequate therapy and confirmed reformation. Of course, on a tight leash, but nonetheless, yes.
Plus, just being an asshole doesn't mean someone can't be reasoned with, sometimes you need an asshole or two on the team to get shit done. The ability to stand your ground with a considerable weapon of knowledge on your back is not asshole behavior, that's just knowing your shit.
I wouldn't hire anyone if they weren't brilliant. I would and do hire knowledgeable assholes, because they tend to know their shit so well that its all they know. That's why I hire them.
So you’d be fine with don’t hire assholes until someone else fixes them.
> Plus, just being an asshole doesn't mean someone can't be reasoned with, sometimes you need an asshole or two on the team to get shit done. The ability to stand your ground with a considerable weapon of knowledge on your back is not asshole behavior, that's just knowing your shit.
I agree with your 2nd sentence, but that also means that you don’t actually need to hire assholes.
> I wouldn't hire anyone if they weren't brilliant. I would and do hire knowledgeable assholes, because they tend to know their shit so well that its all they know. That's why I hire them.
I think the issue here is that you might be confusing people who can stand up for themselves, don’t bullshit, and don’t like to put up with bullshit with assholes.
You are correct - looks like we had two alternative definitions, we agree with each other here! I categorize your definition of assholes as 'dicks', that makes sense.
1. He was just one person working on it. It probably would have happened without him.
2. Despite what you might have seen in some dramatizations, there’s no mention of him being a jerk while working at Bletchley Park.
I visited Bletchley Park Museum a few months ago, it doesn't really mention much of what happened with him at all. Which account are you referring to?
In any case, history is littered with difficult geniuses without talking about just one. Isaac Newton for example.
This is him, at least according to that account:
but we're talking about geohot here, entirely possible he built an agent to handle all criticism
Example [here](https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...).
The hack allowed users to continue using them as such, though to what extent that persisted I don't actually know.
In the PS3 era, the PS3 had the highest compute power (FLOPS) to cost ratio of any commercially-available computer, due to a combination of its parallel architecture and the fact that Sony's business model was to sell the console at a loss and make up the money by taking shares of game revenue (and by charging $6 a month to allow the console to connect to the Internet)
But it turned out that it was possible to jailbreak the PS3 to run software other than certified PS3 games (this was officially allowed at first, but Sony quickly pulled the plug). And as a result, the best bang for your buck for "highly parallel we just need FLOPS" supercomputer workloads was to build a rack of PlayStation 3s.
But that only worked as long as the hack worked.
I recall exploits allowing some level of access to the RSX and other components Sony had locked away from OtherOS as far back as 2007, and Sony had already removed OtherOS from the PS3 Slim with no warning or explanation in August of 2009.
Geohot didn't even start on the PS3 until December of 2009. At that point Sony had already made it clear that they no longer saw value in OtherOS and wanted to get rid of it. Geohot's exploit (which was janky, required external hardware, and didn't even enable homebrew much less piracy) gave them a convenient excuse but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have jumped on any other excuse.
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I do love how Sony immediately learned the hard way that there are a lot of very skilled people out there who are more than happy to play in a sandbox and not make a mess in the rest of the yard as long as it gives them enough room to do something interesting, but if you take the sandbox away they're going to play everywhere else.
"George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), known online by geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur,[1] and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks,[2][3] reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 until November 2025, he worked on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai.[4] Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework."
From the early legal controversy to today, if there's one thing we can expect from geohot, it's that he's gonna think he's god's gift to programming and everyone whose work he disagrees with are losers. But the bluster often doesn't result in much eg his plan to 'fix twitter search' didn't amount to anything (and today in June 2026 twitter search is way less reliable than it was pre-Elon/Hotz/etc in Oct 2022-- but I guess we can't say it's Hotz's fault cause like I said he did approximately nothing)
Punk is actually a good metaphor because the the angst in the music became the blockbuster 'brand' of the music. Being jaded and cynical doesn't make you inherently more interesting it just leaves you--'here', wherever this post is. The programmer equivalent of sporting a studded leather jacket and green mohawk