John McAfee

PowWow, QuoromEx, MGT and more

McAfee founded the company Tribal Voice in 1994, which developed one of the first instant messaging programs, PowWow.

In 2000, he invested in and joined the board of directors of Zone Labs, makers of firewall software, prior to its acquisition by Check Point Software in 2003. In the 2000s McAfee invested in and advertised ultra-light flights, which he marketed as aerotrekking.

In 2000 he bought a large property in Colorado and opened a yoga and meditation retreat there. In the following year he authored four books on yoga and meditation.

In August 2009 The New York Times reported that McAfee's personal fortune had declined to $4 million from a peak of $100 million due to the effect of the 2008 financial crisis on his investments.

McAfee relocated to Belize in 2009, buying a beachfront property on the island of Ambergris Caye and later also some property near the mainland village of Carmelita, where he surrounded himself with a large group of armed security guards.

In 2009, McAfee was interviewed in Belize for the CNBC special The Bubble Decade, in which it was reported that he had invested in and/or built many mansions in the USA that went unsold when the 2007 global recession hit. The report also discussed his quest to raise plants for possible medicinal uses on his land in Belize.

In February 2010, McAfee and biologist Allison Adonizio started the company QuorumEx, headquartered in Belize, which aimed to produce herbal antibiotics that disrupt quorum sensing in bacteria.

In June 2013, McAfee uploaded a parody video titled How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus onto his YouTube channel. In it, he critiques the antivirus software while snorting white powder and being stripped by scantily clad women. It received ten million views. He told Reuters the video was meant to ridicule the media's negative coverage of him. A spokesman for McAfee Inc. called the video's statements "ludicrous".

Also in 2013, McAfee founded Future Tense Central, which aimed to produce a secure computer network device called the D-Central. By 2016, it was also an incubator.

In February 2014, McAfee announced Cognizant, an application for smartphones which displays information about the permissions of other installed applications. In April 2014, it was renamed DCentral 1, and an Android version was released for free on Google Play.

At the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas in August 2014, McAfee warned people not to use smartphones, suggesting apps are used to spy on clueless consumers who do not read privacy user agreements. In January 2016, he became the chief evangelist for security startup Everykey.

In February 2016, McAfee publicly volunteered to decrypt the iPhone used by Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino, avoiding the need for Apple to build a backdoor. He later admitted that his claims regarding the ease of cracking the phone were a publicity stunt, while still asserting its possibility.

MGT Capital Investments (2016–2018)

In May 2016, McAfee was appointed chairman and CEO of MGT Capital Investments, a technology holding company. It initially said it would rename itself John McAfee Global Technologies, although this plan was abandoned due to a dispute with Intel over rights to the "McAfee" name.

He changed MGT's focus from social gaming to cybersecurity, saying "anti-virus software is dead, it no longer works," and that the new goal was to stop hackers before they could enter a network. To lead this pivot, McAfee recruited a technical team from Ontario, Canada, including Robert Rogers and Joshua Kowalchuk, whose firm Ontario High Speed Inc. provided the intellectual property for the company's new roadmap.

The team developed two main products: Sentinel, a hardware-based "honeypot" meant to detect intruders inside a network, and E-tagged, a device for tracking mobile phones and other 802.11 devices. E-tagged used passive ESSID probe request monitoring to track the physical movement of devices. By matching these wireless signals with CCTV footage, the system could identify and track specific individuals or groups based on the unique network names saved on their phones.

Soon after joining MGT, McAfee claimed his team exploited a flaw in the Android system to read encrypted WhatsApp messages. Gizmodo later reported he had sent reporters phones with malware already on them to make the hack work. McAfee replied that while the phones had malware, the story was about how it got there through a "serious flaw in the Android architecture."

In late 2016, the NYSE MKT refused to list the shares MGT needed to complete its purchase of technologies like D-Vasive, effectively stopping the deal. Consequently, the E-tagged project was sidelined to focus on the Sentinel rollout and Bitcoin mining, which McAfee believed was necessary for cybersecurity expertise. A separate project, ClearSkies, was eventually abandoned and labeled "vaporware" after it never materialized.

McAfee stepped down as CEO in August 2017 to become "chief cybersecurity visionary" before leaving MGT in January 2018 to focus on cryptocurrencies. Both sides described the split as amicable.

On 13 August 2018, McAfee took a position of CEO with Luxcore, a cryptocurrency company.

2016 presidential campaign

On 8 September 2015, McAfee announced a bid for president of the United States in the 2016 presidential election, as the candidate of a newly formed political party called the Cyber Party. On 24 December 2015, he re-announced his candidacy bid saying that he would instead seek the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party. On the campaign trail, he consistently polled alongside the party's other top candidates, Gary Johnson and Austin Petersen. The three partook in the Libertarian Party's first nationally televised presidential debate on 29 March 2016. His running mate was photographer, commercial real estate broker and Libertarian activist Judd Weiss.

McAfee came in second in the primaries and third at the 2016 Libertarian National Convention.

Notable endorsements

Adam Kokesh, talk show host and activist

John Moore, Nevada assemblyman

L. Neil Smith, science fiction author and activist

2020 presidential campaign

Contrary to his assertion at the 2016 convention, McAfee tweeted on 3 June 2018 that he would run for president again in 2020, either with the Libertarian Party or a separate party that he would create. He later chose to run as a Libertarian. He mainly campaigned for wider cryptocurrency use.

On 22 January 2019, McAfee tweeted that he would continue his campaign "in exile," following reports that he, his wife, and four campaign staff were indicted for tax-related felonies by the IRS. He said he was in "international waters," and had previously tweeted that he was going to Venezuela. The IRS has not commented on the alleged indictments. He defended Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara on Twitter, putting himself at odds with Libertarian National Committee chairman Nicholas Sarwark, who wrote, "I hear very little buzz about McAfee this time around... making a defense of Che Guevara from Cuba may ingratiate him with the Cuban government, but it didn't resonate well with Libertarians."

In a tweet on 4 March 2020, McAfee simultaneously suspended his 2020 presidential campaign, endorsed Vermin Supreme, and announced his campaign for the Libertarian Party vice presidential nomination. The next day, he returned to the presidential field, reversing the suspension of his bid, as "No one in the Libertarian Party Would consider me For Vice President." The next month, he endorsed Adam Kokesh and became Kokesh's vice-presidential candidate, while still seeking the presidency for himself. At the 2020 Libertarian National Convention, McAfee failed to qualify for the vice-presidential nomination.

Death of Gregory Faull

On 12 November 2012, Belize police began to search for McAfee as a person of interest in connection to the homicide investigation of American immigrant Gregory Viant Faull, who was found dead of a gunshot wound the day before, at his home on the island of Ambergris Caye, the largest island in Belize. Faull was a neighbor of McAfee's. In a contemporary interview with Wired, McAfee said he had been afraid police would kill him and refused their routine questions and evaded them. He buried himself in sand for several hours with a cardboard box over his head. Belize's prime minister, Dean Barrow, called him "extremely paranoid, even bonkers". He fled Belize rather than cooperate.

In December 2012, the magazine Vice accidentally gave away McAfee's location at a Guatemalan resort, when a photo taken by one of its journalists accompanying him was posted with the Exif geolocation metadata still attached.

While in Guatemala, McAfee asked Chad Essley, an American cartoonist and animator, to set up a blog so he could write about his experience while on the run. He then appeared publicly in Guatemala City, where he unsuccessfully sought political asylum.

On 5 December 2012, he was arrested for illegally entering Guatemala. Shortly afterward, the board reviewing his asylum plea denied it and he was taken to a detention center to await deportation to Belize.

On 6 December 2012, Reuters and ABC News reported that McAfee had two minor heart attacks in the detention center and was hospitalized. His lawyer said he had no heart attacks, rather high blood pressure and anxiety attacks. McAfee later said he faked the heart attacks to buy time for his attorney to file a series of appeals that ultimately prevented his deportation to Belize, thus hastening that government's decision to send him back to the United States.

On 12 December 2012, McAfee was released and deported to the United States.

On 14 November 2018, the Circuit Court in Orlando, Florida, refused to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against him for Faull's death. McAfee did not appear in court, lost the case by default and was ordered to pay $25 million to Faull's estate.

U.S. tax evasion charges and planned extradition

In January 2019, McAfee announced that he was on the run from U.S. authorities, and living internationally on a boat following the convening of a grand jury to indict him, his wife, and four of his 2020 Libertarian Party presidential primaries staff on tax evasion charges. At the time, the Internal Revenue Service had not independently confirmed the existence of any such indictment.

On 5 October 2020, McAfee was arrested in Spain at the request of the United States Department of Justice for tax evasion. The June indictment, which was unsealed upon his arrest, alleged he earned millions of dollars from 2014 to 2018, and failed to file income tax returns.

On 6 October, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint further alleging McAfee and his bodyguard promoted certain initial coin offerings (ICOs) in a fraudulent cryptocurrency pump and dump scheme. It claims he presented himself as an impartial investor when he promoted the ICOs, despite allegedly getting paid $23 million in digital assets in return.

On 5 March 2021, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the

Southern District of New York formally indicted him and an executive adviser on these charges.

McAfee was jailed in Spain, pending extradition to the United States.

On 23 June 2021, the Spanish National Court authorized his extradition to face charges in Tennessee; McAfee is suspected of having committed suicide several hours after the authorization, though the official ruling has come under suspicion by the public, as McAfee made clear he had no intention of committing suicide by his tweet from 2019. The tweet, posted in November 2019, said: "Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: 'We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself'. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm." It included a photo of a tattoo that said "$WHACKD." The New York extradition case was still pending in a lower Spanish court.