This month one year ago, we lost a legend. John McAfee took being an eccentric millionaire to the utmost extreme. He got his start as a regular nerd programming computers for NASA, Lockheed, and Xerox. Later, he invented McAfee Antivirus software, which he ran until 1994. He sold off his shares and left the company, and things got really interesting from there. His life became a crime thriller full of drugs, booze, women, guns, an armed entourage, being wanted in several countries and living on the lam, even running for President twice.
The man was an anarchist through and through. He resented the rule of law and did what he wanted, where he wanted. He had the money to back himself up, and had armed security pretty much everywhere he went. He turned himself into his own country with blackjack and hookers, which naturally attracted the attention of every government he came in contact with.
One such government was Belize, where McAfee had set up a business studying antibiotic plants native to the area. Suddenly, his neighbor gets shot in the face and he’s wanted for murder. The Belize government says he’s been manufacturing narcotics, and he’s no longer welcome in town. McAfee himself insisted that you’d have to be a moron to manufacture narcotics in the heart of cartel territory and that the government was extorting him. They killed his neighbor by mistake and pinned it on him, so he fled.
He sought asylum in Guatemala but was denied, and got deported back to the United States. The night he arrived he hired a prostitute in Miami, who he married a year later. He got involved in the smartphone business, developing apps and hardware that focused on privacy. He ran for President as a Libertarian, running on a platform of free trade, legal drugs, non-interventionism, and fixing our appalling lack of cybersecurity and privacy. He ran in 2016, then again in 2020.
McAfee once said he had no expectation of becoming President. He had so many arrests for drugs, guns, driving under the influence, and wearing a thong instead of a face-mask that getting elected just wasn’t in the cards. It was mostly a publicity stunt to get people talking about the threat of cyberterrorism and the obscene amount of power that we give our tech companies. In 2020, his presidential campaign was cut short when the IRS indicted him and his entourage for about 10 years in unpaid taxes. Something he’d been bragging about the whole time.
He lived on the lam for a while before being arrested in Spain, where the Spanish courts approved his extradition to the United States. Before he’d even heard the news, he was found dead in his cell at the age of 75. Suicide by hanging was the official ruling, and his lawyers and widow are contesting that to this day.
Does a man with no fear of cartels or corrupt Central American governments kill himself at the first sign up going to prison? Why did the government ignore his unpaid taxes for ten years, only coming for him while he was raising the alarm on widespread surveillance and government corruption? Perhaps he was just an old man, and he was tired of living on the edge. The only thing we may ever know for certain is that he was the baddest motherfucker in computer science.
Spud media 