John McAfee

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.

In 2000 he bought a large property in Colorado and opened a yoga and meditation retreat there. …

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

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. …

McAfee was named a defendant in a 2008 civil court case related to his Aerotrekking light-sport aircraft venture and the death of nephew Joel Bitow and a passenger.

On 30 April 2012, McAfee's property in Orange Walk Town, Belize, was raided by the Gang Suppression Unit of the Belize Police Department. A GSU press release said he was arrested for unlicensed drug manufacturing and possession of an unlicensed weapon. He was released without charge. In December 2012, McAfee told a Wired reporter that from 2010 to 2011 he had made several posts to the drug discussion forum Bluelight discussing his use and manufacturing of the stimulant drug MDPV under the alias 'Stuffmonger'. As of March 2024, the Stuffmonger account had made 220 posts on the site in 2010 and early 2011.

In 2012, Belize police spokesman Raphael Martinez confirmed that McAfee was neither convicted nor charged, only suspected.

In January 2014, while in Canada, he said that when the Belizean government raided his property, it seized his assets, and that his house later burned down under suspicious circumstances.

On 2 August 2015, McAfee was arrested in Henderson County, Tennessee, on one count of driving under the influence and one count of possession of a firearm while intoxicated.

In July 2019, McAfee and members of his entourage were arrested while his yacht was docked at Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, on suspicion of carrying high-caliber weapons and ammunition. They were held for four days and released. Weapons were seized, according to the Public Ministry.

On 11 August 2020, McAfee falsely stated that he was arrested in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic after refusing to replace a lace thong with a more effective face mask. He later tweeted a picture of himself with a bruised eye, claiming it occurred during this arrest. A photo of the alleged arrest shows an officer with the German word for "police" on his uniform, ostensibly invalidating McAfee's claim of having been arrested in Norway. The Augsburg police later said he tried to enter Germany on that day, but was not arrested.

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. …

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.

In a 2012 article in Mensa Bulletin, the magazine of the American Mensa, McAfee said developing the first commercial antivirus program had made him "the most popular hacking target" and "[h]ackers see hacking me as a badge of honor." For his own cybersecurity, he said he had other people buy his computer equipment for him, used pseudonyms for setting up computers and logins, and changed his IP address several times a day. When asked on another occasion if he personally used McAfee's antivirus software, he replied: "I take it off [...] it's too annoying."

According to a 2016 article, McAfee had been using the then-legal drug alpha-PHP which he imported from China and which may have caused his paranoia. McAfee reportedly previously used the stimulant drug MDPV beginning in 2010, and was a member of the online drug discussion forum Bluelight.

In December 2018, he tweeted that he had "47 genetic children." His third wife described him in a Father's Day message as "father of many, loved by few."