McAfee is a familiar brand to anyone who has been using computers for a while. The first antivirus program, from the days when computers were only beginning to take over our lives.
And the man whose name it bears is so colorful and so unconventional against the backdrop of so many dull stories from the software world that there is simply no way not to dive into his Digital Story. Although he passed away a year ago, John McAfee remains to this day a favorite figure for connoisseurs of powerful stories, and for conspiracy lovers too.
He claimed to have 47 children. He tried twice to become president of the United States. He said he would never kill himself, and that if such news ever appeared, it would mean the authorities had murdered him. Then that news appeared, and it turned out to be true. His heirs fought a legal battle that kept him from being buried for a long time.
His life was an endless party, more strangely bohemian than anyone else's in the world of Silicon Valley. A little Steve Jobs, a little Donald Trump and a little Mityo Pishtova, the swaggering braggart of Bulgarian popular lore, fused into an explosive alloy.
Fuel for Greed
“In a democracy, power is given, not taken. But it is still power. Love, compassion, caring have no place in it. But it is fuel for greed, hostility, jealousy… All power corrupts. Be careful what powers you give to democracy.”
This quote, worthy of Machiavelli… or perhaps Marx, appeared on John McAfee's Twitter profile at 7 p.m. on June 18, 2021. It turned out to be his last tweet; five days later he was found dead in his cell in a Barcelona prison.
If you haven't come across the story, it probably sounds rather strange. The creator of hugely successful software kills himself in prison… And indeed, none of the usual clichés apply to good old John McAfee.
Born on an American military base in England, he made good money in Silicon Valley and departed of his own free will (or did he?) at the age of 75 in Barcelona. He used to say he felt as much Scottish as American.
His star rose in 1987, when he created the first commercial software product designed to protect computers from viruses. Not one to suffer from excessive modesty, he named it after himself, and the company too: McAfee Associates.
His product was not only the first commercial antivirus program but also the first software sold over the internet. Two revolutions that shaped much of the software world's future.
Time to Disinfect
McAfee's biography is interesting even before that. In the late 1960s he worked as a programmer for NASA on the Apollo program, and later rose to the position of architect of the operating system being developed by Xerox.
So how did he end up with viruses? In 1980 he was hired by Lockheed, and there he first saw Brain, the first computer virus (according to some). “When I first heard about Brain, created in Pakistan, I had never heard of viruses. Nobody had, and that got me very excited,” he said later.
Antivirus programs turned out to be an enormous market in the early 1990s, when personal computers suddenly went from being a university luxury to a fixture of the home. The company quickly piled up serious profits and grew… until, very soon, its creator showed the public his knotty character for the first time. In 1994 McAfee sold his stake and left the helm of the company.
To live it up. Whether his children really numbered 47, as he claimed, we can only guess. How many mothers there were, likewise, but clearly he managed to get past the antivirus measures in life, just as his software did on our old computers.
McAfee vs. McAfee
Meanwhile, he loved using every opportunity to urge people not to buy the products of the software company he had founded. Because they would not protect them from viruses; they would only bog down their computers. The company carried his name until 2014. Its new owners at the time, Intel, decided to change the name, and McAfee made a point of thanking them for freeing him from any association with “the worst software on the planet.”
What's more, he told the BBC that he had never used any antivirus software in his life.
McAfee went on to found several more software companies, among them the chat app PowWow, but he never matched the commercial success of his first venture, the one that bore his name.
His fortune reached 100 million dollars at the start of the century, and then, because of the financial crisis, it shrank dramatically to 4 million by 2009, by his own admission. He had decided to invest in real estate just as sales in the U.S. collapsed.
He left America and moved to Belize. He claimed the reason was to research the medical applications of various hallucinogens… Yes, you can guess. According to witnesses, he spent his days at endless parties with local girls instead.
The Great Combinator
The finale here is stunning, too: he had to flee the boutique Central American country over… suspicions of murder. He was never officially charged with his neighbor's death, but he was never questioned either.
He was detained in neighboring Guatemala and was about to be extradited when… he suffered two heart attacks. McAfee later admitted he had faked them to buy his lawyer time.
In 2015 he was arrested for driving drunk in a car full of illegally owned weapons.
Then he decided it would be a good idea to become… president of the United States. He tried, unsuccessfully, to win the Libertarian Party's nomination for the 2016 and 2020 elections. It didn't work out, but both times he came close to the official nomination. During the second attempt, because of his troubles with the law, he had to move his campaign headquarters… to Cuba. Meanwhile his beloved yacht waited for him at Havana's Marina Hemingway.
Remember, remember…
Like other pioneers of the computer world (Jaron Lanier, for example), he often repeated that we must be very careful with how we use our personal data online and with the consents we give.
In his classic style, the mathematics PhD posted a video to his YouTube channel in 2013 called “How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus,” in which he is surrounded by not overly dressed ladies and pretends to snort a mysterious white powder. He later told Reuters he had done it to mock the negative way the media portrayed him.
Several times he loudly claimed to have cracked the software protections of the iPhone and Android operating systems, but his claims later proved dubious, to say the least.
In 2017 he tweeted that the price of bitcoin would reach half a million dollars within three years, and that if it didn't, he would appear on national television and eat… a part of his body that he physiologically could not reach.
His last big ventures were in cryptocurrencies. McAfee believed that blockchain technology could help introduce the libertarian values he liked so much: a free market, equality, no state interference in other people's affairs, and the free use of soft drugs.
He claimed that a great deal depended on how we handle the security of blockchain technologies. In the spring of 2020 he even launched his own eco-friendly cryptocurrency called Ghost, which, however, never achieved much success.
In his final years he often repeated that taxes were illegal. He even boasted publicly that, thanks to cryptocurrencies, he had managed to stop paying his. That is exactly what led the story to its end; it is never a good idea to brag about something like that when the other side is the state that regards itself as the world's hegemon.
Antiviruses
And so we come to the tragic denouement. In October 2020 McAfee was arrested in Barcelona on charges of not paying his taxes for four years. Days before he was to be extradited to the U.S., he was found hanged in his cell. And, as you can guess, this sparked all kinds of suspicions. During his lifetime he often said that he would never do such a thing, and that if it happened, it would be staged and would in fact be murder.
Those words sounded all the more convincing because his father had shot himself when the future computer guru was only 15.
From June last year until the first months of this one, his body remained unburied. Somewhat understandable, since, although officially they are not 47, his children number… nobody knows how many. Officially he had three wives (according to other sources, there was also one more brief marriage). He met his first wife while working on his doctoral dissertation, when she was a student. At the time this was not allowed, and it led to his doctoral studies being cut short.
Particularly charming was his relationship with the last one, Janice. They met while she was working as a prostitute and offered him her services. Then they talked all night about the meaning of life, and love caught fire. The age difference between them was 30 years. According to some sources, they divorced a few months before his death, but it is a fact that in his final months she was the person closest to him.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Janice was on one side of the legal dispute that delayed McAfee's burial. She was in court against the programmer's eldest daughter, Jen, who doesn't even want to reveal her current surname. Why it mattered so much to both of them to bury McAfee has never become clear.
Did he really kill himself? Two forensic examinations established that he did, and many people who knew him say he was paranoid to the extreme. Mark Eglinton, the journalist who was preparing his memoirs, describes how John made his wife taste every dish first because he was afraid she might poison him.
Islands in the Stream
Three days after his death, the letter Q was posted on his Instagram profile, which the media linked to the conspiracy movement QAnon. On Wikipedia, an edit quickly appeared next to his name saying he had been murdered.
Janice McAfee continues to insist that it was murder and that he would never have taken his own life. They spoke on the phone that same day; he told her he loved her and that they would talk again in the evening.
His lawyer, the last person to speak with him, also says he noticed no signs of suicidal intent at their final meeting.
Others say he had made another attempt a year earlier. It is also said that there was a farewell letter in his pocket, whose contents have not been made public.
For the Sake of a Fine Name…
And finally… You read that Intel changed the name of the world-famous antivirus company, which particularly delighted McAfee. The global giant bought the company for an impressive $7.7 billion… our friend would have made quite a bit had he hung on there a little longer.
And a few years later, clearly counting on the brand's good image, Intel renamed its cybersecurity unit after our hero's surname once again.
So, despite everything and after everything, McAfee is still a huge brand associated with security. I sincerely hope that when someone someday sits down to write a novel about the fate of this remarkable character, they will have the pen of Hemingway. Or at least of Vargas Llosa…
