What might Sony Corp. CEO Howard Stringer say if he ran across hacker George "GeoHot" Hotz right now? It’s safe to bet it wouldn't be “Hey, congratulations, kid.”

Hotz, who settled a hacking lawsuit with Sony in April, now works for Facebook, perhaps the hottest tech company around and one whose latest valuation places it at upwards of $70 billion. The company confirmed reports that the 21-year-old hacker extraordinaire has a new job at the social-networking site, although a spokeswoman declined to tell the Wall Street Journal in what capacity.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo Tuesday, Stringer was hanging on by a thread to his position as the chief executive of Sony Corp. He went into full-on defense mode with shareholders still dealing with the fallout of a humiliating series of hacker attacks this spring that compromised the personal data of 100 million online gaming and entertainment accounts, chiefly those connected to its PlayStation Network.

No one claims that Hotz called for a mob-style hit on Sony’s servers, but the company believes it was targeted by hackers in retaliation for the lawsuit against Hotz, a twentysomething techie with unruly hair who is considered a hero in hacking circles. Hotz published details online on how to install unauthorized software and essentially “jailbreak” Sony’s PlayStation 3's software, information that Sony said allowed the console to be used for pirated videogames.

At the shareholders meeting, Stringer likened hackers to terrorists. "These are our corporate assets, and there are those who don't want us to protect them," he said.

Stringer took a 16 percent pay cut last fiscal year to $4.3 million plus stock options, but it’s not enough for several prominent shareholders who are looking at $24 billion in losses from cyber attacks, questioning Sony’s response to the data breach, and calling for Stringer’s head.

The Hacker Versus the Corporate Climber

Comparing Stringer's career path to that of Hotz is an interesting exercise in how the business world has changed in a digital era.

A Welsh native who was educated at Oxford University and became a U.S. citizen in 1985, Stringer, is now in his late 60s and took the helm at Sony in June 2005. He spent 30 years as a journalist, producer and senior executive at CBS Inc. You can even call him Sir Howard Stringer: Queen Elizabeth II knighted him at Buckingham Palace back on December 31, 1999.

As for Hotz, he’s more of a dark knight. A computer geek from Glen Rock, New Jersey, he attended a magnet high school for technology, and won a $20,000 Intel science fair prize for a device that projected a 3-D image. But he gained press attention for some extracurricular hacking activities. At age 17, he won what he described as a worldwide race to unlock the Apple iPhone so it could be used by a carrier other than AT&T (his family subscribed to T-Mobile, and he wanted to be able to use the phone).

An interviewer from the Bergen County Record who visited the budding boy genius's home in 2007 was led into a room full of lathes, soldering irons, and reimagined objects, including a toaster oven that was converted to a reflow oven so that it could perform precision soldering jobs. The teen had dissected a car that his father reminded him to put back together, the story noted.

Hotz reportedly attended the Rochester Institute of Technology for a short time in 2007, but left quickly. That schooling history might not have been a hiring deterrent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been honing his own hacking skills by the time he dropped out of Harvard himself.

Without classes to attend, Hotz's on-the-side hacking activities seemed to continue unabated. It was in 2010 that he hacked the PS3, a job that he told journalists took him about five weeks.

"It's supposed to be unhackable—but nothing is unhackable," Hotz told BBC News in an interview last year. "I can now do whatever I want with the system. It's like I've got an awesome new power—I'm just not sure how to wield it."

Perhaps Facebook has some ideas. The company, which holds hackathons at the office, could reportedly be using Hotz to help with developing an iPad app. If Hotz has anything to do with it, we suspect it will be hack-proof, but if it is not, some hacker out there could have something amazing to put on a résumé.

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com