John McAfee, the eccentric king of antivirus who squandered his fortune until he died broke

John McAfee has always been considered one of Silicon Valley’s darlings. This tycoon and computer programmer, among other facets, will always remain in everyone’s memory thanks to his antivirus software created in 1987. However, his extravagant way of living life after abandoning his profession and settling in Central America, where drugs, prostitutes, weapons and arrests were the order of the day.

Before settling in Belize, McAfee founded several companies starting in the 1990s, during which time he was earning around $5 million a year. After leaving the firm that he had founded in 1994 -he resigned from all executive positions although he kept his participation and saved his shares that he would later sell-, he took over IntruVert Networks in 2003, a company dedicated to the development of technology to prevent intrusion attacks; and in 2006 he preempted Symantec in buying SiteAdvisor, a service that warns users about the risks of malware or spam when downloading software or filling in forms.

However, the economic boom times for McAfee ended with the financial crisis of 2007. At that time, this businessman came to invest most of his fortune in brick, specifically in a real estate business for the sale of mansions. But he didn’t do well. This crack caused a considerable drop in his fortune, going from 100 to ‘only’ 4 million dollars.

Undoubtedly, a setback before which McAfee decided to change the air and head to Central America. But before that, in 2009, he created Tribal Voice, which developed one of the first PowWow instant messaging programs. In 2010, a new stage focused on the field of bacterial quorum sensing began under the name of QuorumEx, whose headquarters resided in Belize, although it was finally dissolved in 2012. Also in that year, Intel, the world’s largest manufacturer of microchips, announced the purchase of McAfee, which at the same time had already announced investment in companies specialized in mobile device security, such as tenCube and Trust Digital.

dark end

In the documentary released by Netflix on August 24, Live without brakes: The turbulent world of John McAfee, several turbulent episodes of the businessman are collected: from being a fugitive wanted for the alleged murder of his neighbor to his parties with drugs, weapons and prostitutes on superyachts, plus extradition for tax evasion. According to the Washington Post, John McAfee was arrested 21 times in 11 different countries for crimes related to drug trafficking, among other reasons.

All this turbulence began in 2012 with the murder of Greg Faull, a neighbor of John McAfee. According to the documentary, McAfee and Faull had fallen out in 2012 over the behavior of McAfee’s four dogs, which harassed Faull’s parrot. McAfee’s dogs were poisoned and killed, and a day later, Faull was found dead, shot in the head. From there, the businessman begins to flee from him along with his girlfriend Sam.

Undoubtedly, the high consumption of drugs began to take its toll on a John McAfee who was becoming increasingly aware of a greater mental health crisis. Did a drug cartel want to get him? Did he actually install keystroke technology on the authorities’ computers to know they were after him? Did he really kill his father as you suggest?

Apart from this, McAfee presented two candidacies for the presidency of the United States, in 2016 and 2020. The well-known businessman proclaimed himself a libertarian, defending the decriminalization of cannabis, the end of the war on drugs and a free market economy that does not redistribute wealth, among other things. A faithful defender of cryptocurrencies, McAfee even said in 2017 that the price of bitcoin would reach $500,000 in three years, something that has not happened by far.

Conspiracy theories about his death

In one of his many escapes, McAfee arrived in Barcelona, ​​where he was again arrested on October 5, 2020 on behalf of the United States Department of Justice for tax evasion and a fraudulent cryptocurrency “pump and dump” scheme. During that time, McAfee lived most of the time in a low-cost aparthotel in Catalonia where he had several computers mining bitcoins.

In June 2021, one day after the Supreme Court approved his extradition to the US, where he was wanted for alleged tax crimes. Curiously, her third wife, Janice McAfee, assures that her death was not a suicide and even dared to say that John was still alive and that he had contacted her. However, and as confirmed by Reuters, his body remains in a Spanish mortuary a year after his death, and a court case by his wife to demand new verifications has still not been resolved.

According to the journalist who made his documentary, McAfee died broke as a result of spending his fortune on luxurious mansions. “My decisions were the same that any normal person would have made. I think you would have done the same in those circumstances,” McAfee declares at the beginning of the documentary.