John McAfee

John David McAfee (, MAK-ə-fee; 18 September 1945 – 23 June 2021) was a British and American computer programmer, businessman, and two-time U.S. presidential candidate who unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and in 2020. In 1987, he wrote the first commercial anti-virus software, founding McAfee Associates to sell his creation. He resigned in 1994 and sold his remaining stake in the company. McAfee became the company's most vocal critic in later years, urging consumers to uninstall the company's anti-virus software, which he characterized as bloatware. He disavowed the company's continued use of his name in branding, a practice that has persisted in spite of a short-lived corporate rebrand attempt under Intel ownership.

McAfee's fortunes plummeted in the 2008 financial crisis. After leaving McAfee Associates, he founded the companies Tribal Voice (makers of the PowWow chat program), QuorumEx, and Future Tense Central, among others, and was involved in leadership positions in the companies Everykey, MGT Capital Investments, and Luxcore, among others. His personal and business interests included smartphone apps, cryptocurrency, yoga, light-sport aircraft and recreational drug use. He resided for multiple years in Belize but returned to the United States in 2013 while wanted in Belize for questioning on suspicion of murder.

McAfee was a vocal advocate for privacy and personal freedom, central to his libertarian campaigns in 2016 and 2020. He opposed government surveillance and supported cryptocurrency as a way to reduce state control over financial systems. He framed his legal issues, including tax evasion charges, as resistance to unjust government overreach.

In October 2020, McAfee was arrested in Spain over U.S. tax evasion charges. U.S. federal prosecutors brought criminal and civil charges alleging that McAfee had failed to file income taxes over a four-year period. On 23 June 2021, he was found dead due to an apparent suicide by hanging in his prison cell near Barcelona shortly after the Spanish National Court authorized his extradition to the U.S. His death generated speculation and theories about the possibility that he was murdered. McAfee's wife, Janice McAfee, said she did not believe McAfee died by suicide.

McAfee was born in Cinderford, in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England, on 18 September 1945, on a U.S. Army base (of the 596th Ordnance Ammunition Company), to an American father, Don McAfee, who was stationed there, and a British mother, Joan Williams. His father was from Roanoke, Virginia. McAfee was primarily raised in Salem, Virginia, and said he felt as much British as American. When he was 15, his father, whom a BBC columnist described as "an abusive alcoholic", killed himself with a gun. He had spent his childhood living in fear that a beating from his father could happen at any time and struggled to make sense of why this was happening to him. In Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee, it is alleged that McAfee may have shot and killed his father, staging the scene to look like a suicide.

McAfee received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1967 from Roanoke College in Virginia, which later awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 2008. After receiving his bachelor's degree, McAfee began working towards a doctorate in mathematics at Northeast Louisiana State College, but was expelled in about 1968 because of a relationship with an undergraduate student, who became his first wife.

McAfee was employed as a programmer by NASA from 1968 to 1970. From there, he went to Univac as a software designer, and later to Xerox as an operating system architect. In 1978, he joined Computer Sciences Corporation as a software consultant. He worked for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton from 1980 to 1982. In 1986, while employed by Lockheed, he read about the Brain computer virus made for the PC, and he found it terrifying. Sensing a business opportunity, he went about creating an antivirus software that could detect the computer virus and remove it automatically. In 1987, McAfee created McAfee Associates Inc. to sell this software, which he named VirusScan. This was the first anti-virus software brought to market, and one of the first software products to be distributed over the Internet.

Initially McAfee did not seek a large userbase of paying users, but rather wanted to raise awareness of the need to be protected from computer viruses. However, by making people fear such malware, he managed to generate millions of sales, and by 1990 he was making $5 million a year. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1992, and had its initial public offering the same year. In August 1993, McAfee stepped down as chief executive and remained with the company as the chief technical officer. He was succeeded by Bill Larson. In 1994 he sold his remaining stake in the company. He had no further involvement in its operations.

After various mergers and ownership changes, Intel acquired McAfee in August 2010. In January 2014, Intel announced that McAfee-related products would be marketed as Intel Security. McAfee expressed his pleasure at the name change, saying, "I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet." The business was soon de-merged from Intel, once more under the McAfee name.

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.

McAfee advocated for the decriminalization of cannabis, an end to the war on drugs, non-interventionism in foreign policy, a free market economy which does not redistribute wealth, and upholding free trade. He supported abolishing the Transportation Security Administration.

McAfee advocated increased cyber awareness and more action against the threat of cyberwarfare. He pushed religious liberty, saying that business owners should be able to deny service in circumstances that contradict their religious beliefs, adding: "No one is forcing you to buy anything or to choose one person over another. So why should I be forced to do anything if I am not harming you? It's my choice to sell, your choice to buy."

McAfee contended that taxes were illegal, and claimed in 2019 that he had not filed a tax return since 2010. He referred to himself as "a prime target" of the Internal Revenue Service.

In July 2017, McAfee predicted on Twitter that the price of a bitcoin would jump to $500,000 within three years, adding: "If not, I will eat my own dick on national television." In July 2019, he predicted a price of $1 million by the end of 2020. In January 2020, he tweeted that his predictions were "a ruse to onboard new users," and that bitcoin had limited potential because it is "an ancient technology."

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 married three times. He met his first wife, Fran, circa 1968 while he was working towards a doctorate at Northeast Louisiana State College and she was an 18-year-old undergraduate student. Their affair led to his expulsion from the college. He married his second wife, Judy, a former flight attendant at American Airlines, circa 1987; they divorced in 2002.

The night after McAfee arrived in the United States after being deported from Guatemala in December 2012, he was solicited by and slept with Janice Dyson, then a prostitute 30 years his junior in South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida. They began a relationship and married in 2013. She claims that he saved her from human traffickers. The couple moved to Portland, Oregon in 2013.

On 23 June 2021, McAfee was found dead in his prison cell, hours after the Spanish National Court ordered his extradition to the United States on criminal charges filed in Tennessee by the United States Department of Justice Tax Division. The Catalan Justice Department said "everything indicates" he killed himself by hanging. An official autopsy confirmed his suicide. A Spanish court also ruled McAfee died by suicide.

McAfee's death ignited speculation and conspiracy theories about the possibility that he was murdered. Such speculation was particularly fueled by a 2019 post McAfee made on Twitter that read, in part, "If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd [sic]." McAfee's death drew comparisons to the circumstances of the death of American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Several times, McAfee said if he were ever found dead by hanging, it would mean he was murdered. The day after his death, his lawyer told reporters that he regularly maintained contact with McAfee in prison and saw no signs of suicidal intent. McAfee's widow reaffirmed this position in her first public remarks since her husband's death, and also called for a "thorough" investigation.

On 14 December 2023, the morgue delivered McAfee's body to his family to be taken to the United States for his funeral. Until then, it had been kept in a refrigerator at the Justice City of Barcelona.

In a November 2023 interview with Cointelegraph, McAfee's widow Janice McAfee said that he died without a will or estate which left her without any money and that she was working odd jobs to make ends meet.

In January 2025, McAfee's X (formerly Twitter) account became active announcing the launch of a meme coin cryptocurrency and a chatbot, both called 'AIntivirus'. A day later McAfee's widow Janice McAfee, who had access to the account, wrote that his account was not hacked and that the meme coin and chatbot were created to "honor John's legacy and his memory", which generated a number of critical responses over it being a potential scam. As of January 2025, the AIntivirus coin has a market capitalization of $37 million, though the Antivirus X account was later suspended.

Showtime released the 2016 documentary film Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, which raised numerous allegations about his life in Belize, from the sexual assault of his QuorumEx business partner Allison Adonizio, to ordering the murders of Belizean David Middleton and American expat Gregory Faull. In a September 2016 interview with Bloomberg's Pimm Fox and Kathleen Hayes, McAfee maintained the film's incidents were fabricated, claiming "Belize is a third-world banana republic and you can go down there and make any story you want if you pay your interviewees, which Showtime did."

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa stated in 2017 they would direct a film about McAfee titled King of the Jungle, written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. At various points, Johnny Depp, Michael Keaton, and Seth Rogen were reported to have taken roles and later to have left the project. Zac Efron was reported to star as journalist Ari Furman.

ABC News series 20/20 interviewed McAfee and his wife in 2017 regarding Faull's murder.

The 2022 documentary film Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee includes footage from an unreleased documentary by Vice, and interviews by Rocco Castoro, Alex Cody Foster, and Robert King.

The character of Mr. Boss in the Adult Swim animated series Smiling Friends was partially based on McAfee.

Computer Viruses, Worms, Data Diddlers, Killer Programs, and Other Threats to Your System. What They Are, How They Work, and How to Defend Your PC, Mac, or Mainframe, (with Colin Haynes) St. Martin's Press, 1989

The Secret of the Yamas: Spiritual Guide to Yoga, McAfee Pub, 2001

The Fabric of Self: Meditations on Vanity and Love, Woodland Publications, 2001

Into the Heart of Truth, Woodland Publications, 2001

Beyond the Siddhis. Supernatural Powers and the Sutras of Patanjali, Woodland Publications, 2001