After announcing his upcoming retirement earlier in the year, former President and CEO of Sony Kaz Hirai departed the company on June 18th. Hirai, whose career with Sony spans a total of 35 years, stepped down from his Chairman position this past April, and will remain available as a Senior Adviser should Sony's management team require any assistance in the future.

Hirai first joined Sony as part of the company's music division, and would remain there until he moved to North America and became part of the team at Sony Computer Entertainment in 1995; the same year the PlayStation launched in the region. He would eventually succeed Ken Kutaragi as the President of PlayStation in 2006, beginning a time with Hirai being heavily involved in multiple console generations, as well as the most significant years Sony attempted to make a dent in the handheld gaming ecosystem with the PSP and PlayStation Vita.

Hirai would eventually become the President and CEO of Sony in 2012, at which point the company was dealing with one of its worst years financially. Following a lost of over $6 billion in 2011, Sony looked to Hirai to help steer more reliance into the company's gaming division, while also finding ways to cut unnecessary costs. Given the success of the PlayStation 4, as it nears nearly 100 million hardware sales in less than six years, Hirai and Yoshida, who the latter was Sony's operating CFO at the time, can be heavily credited for the successful turnaround. Currently, Yoshida is the acting CEO for Sony, as he succeeded the role from Kaz Hirai in 2018.

kaz hirai retires sony president ceo

While Kaz Hirai will be best known for his three and a half decades of contributions to Sony, one particular fan took advantage of the Hirai name for the purpose of humor for a number of years. Between 2011 to 2018, the Twitter Parody account @KazHiraiCEO provided gamers with tons of comic relief in video game form. It's impressive the user, who later revealed themselves following their tenure on social media under the Hirai name, never ran into issues with either Sony or Hirai that caused the account to be suspended or removed. The account even caught the attention of Hirai himself, though he apparently never read any of the tweets.

Source: PSU