Short answers, pulled from the story.
Masaru Ibuka opened a small electronics shop inside the Shirokiya department store building in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district in 1946. The venture began with just ¥190,000 in capital and eight employees working together to build Japan's first tape recorder.
Akio Morita joined Ibuka on May 7 of 1946 to formalize their partnership under the name Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Their early products included an electric rice cooker from the late 1940s before they shifted focus entirely to audio technology.
The decision to change the company name to Sony occurred in January 1958 after years of struggling with international recognition. Founders Ibuka and Morita chose Sony because it combined the Latin word sonus meaning sound with sonny, a slang term for young men popular in 1950s America.
Norio Ohga purchased CBS Records in 1988 for two billion dollars. The acquisition included rights to Michael Jackson's ATV catalogue, which became one of the most successful entertainment assets ever recorded.
Sony introduced U-matic, the world's first videocassette format, in 1971 but found it unpopular for domestic use due to its high price tag. The company subsequently launched Betamax in 1975 during a videotape format war against JVC's VHS system.
In November 2025, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit alleging companies were illegally spying on Texans using automated content recognition technology secretly recording what consumers watched inside their homes.