John McAfee



John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder. John McAfee (September 18, 1945 – June 23, 2021) was a whale-fucking,  drugged out, and horrifying "eccentric" cyber-security and technology businessman and bullshit artist.

McAfee first became notable for creating the dreaded McAfee Security software suite. The software bearing his name is bloatware that comes preinstalled on some Windows computers and some Android devices, returns a ton of false-positives, can't be easily removed, has full control over your computer, and reads all the data stored on it continuously in real-time. But isn't a virus because it is anti-virus software. It is so bad not even McAfee himself could defend it, and he made humorous videos demonstrating how to uninstall the software.

He later became known for being a high-profile suspect in a murder case, his involvement in cryptocurrency ventures like Bitcoin, and politics. He ran for President as a Libertarian, but he lost very badly to Gary Johnson — d'oh!

Early career
McAfee's early life was troubled, with his abusive father committing suicide when he was 15, and much of his early life was spent in the clutches of drugs or alcoholism. In the mid-1980s, McAfee cleaned up his act, went sober, set out to tackle the then-relatively-new problem of computer viruses, and developed McAfee Antivirus Software. His built-in paranoid personality actually became a useful asset, as he was able to utilize this to help market his software in apocalyptic, often grossly-exaggerated, terms. The resulting business success allowed McAfee to sell the shares in his company in 1994 for $100 million, making him quite well off.

He originally kept a low profile for several years after the sale. For a while, McAfee spent time promoting an obscure "sport" that could be considered either reckless or living-on-the-edge cool, depending on your point of view — "aerotrekking", a concept involving flying a type of plane called an very close to the ground, sometimes even in between canyon walls. Unfortunately, the hit McAfee particularly hard, reducing his net worth to "just" $4 million (either that, or McAfee "rearranged" his finances in order to avoid major repercussions from a wrongful-death lawsuit, filed due to an "aerotrekking" accident that claimed the life of his nephew, Joel Gordon Bitow, and passenger Robert Gilson). At any rate, he re-located to Belize shortly afterwards, where much of his most bizarre behavior began.

Paranoia and murder allegations
McAfee started off in Belize relatively innocuously, supporting a microbiologist who wanted to isolate plant compounds that might end up being an effective medicine someday, or, if not that, (in typical McAfee style) an enhancement for female libido. (True to form, of course, McAfee wildly exaggerated his accomplishments to would-be investors with his usual trolling and bullshit.) Soon after, however, his behavior became increasingly bizarre, driving both his longtime girlfriend Jennifer Irwin and the microbiologist in question, Allison Adonizio, away from having anything to do with him, due to his bizarre, sexually inappropriate behavior and violent outbursts. McAfee increasingly became — at least, in his mind — intertwined with the dark and violent underworld of Belize, increasingly believing that everyone was out to kill him, and increasingly posting about mind-altering stimulants online (stimulants that have unfortunate side effects like, say, making you believe that everyone is out to kill you).

McAfee was thrown into the media spotlight on November 11, 2012, when Gregory Faull, McAfee's neighbor, was found dead in his home, shot in the head. Due to the fact that Mr. Faull complained about McAfee's guns, behavior, and dogs, and, given that a couple of days before the murder some of McAfee's dogs were suspiciously poisoned, McAfee was immediately named a "person of interest" by the local Belize police. McAfee fled from Belize to Guatemala (while pleading innocence, of course), where he was promptly arrested. After supposedly faking a heart attack, McAfee was deported to the United States.

In 2016, a documentary film unveiled about McAfee's time in Belize, "Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee" by Nanette Burstein, suggested that not only that there is "a searing body of evidence" that McAfee paid a hitman to torture and kill Mr. Faull, he also had another victim (David Middleton, a local who robbed his home) mutilated and killed, and that he also drugged and raped Allison Adonizio. McAfee reacted per his usual style by dismissing the film as "all nonsense" and suggesting that the film was a conspiracy hatched against him by the Belize government.

On March 19, 2019, in a lawsuit brought about by the Faull estate, McAfee, in a default judgement, was fined 25 million dollars by a Florida judge for wrongful death. Of course, Mr. McAfee was dismissive of not only the lawsuit but the American judicial system in itself, calling it a "legal extortion game aimed at America's wealthy class."

Drugs
Ordinary drugs simply didn't suit the mind of John McAfee, who instead preferred the "smooth euphoria", "mild comedown", and "indescribable hypersexuality" in of obscure "research chemicals" like (MDPV). McAfee liked his MDPV tan-colored (all the better to relish the impurities!); the pure white powder wouldn't do. Under his "stuffmonger" alias, beginning in December 2010, McAfee posted an epic thread on the Bluelight drug forum about his MDPV enlightenment, a thread that demonstrated stupendous ineptitude in organic chemistry knowledge and laboratory practice, as well as some incredibly bizarre sexual deviancy. Now, officially, McAfee did this only to troll Bluelight (on a bet), and officially, although in his youth a heavy consumer of hallucinogens and alcohol, he hadn't touched drugs since 1983. However, McAfee was also happy to tweet about wanting someone to manufacture other obscure "research chemicals" such as (which, contrary to his assertion, is illegal in many countries). Furthermore, he was happy to occasionally tweet that he was, in fact, indeed high at that very moment on obscure research chemicals, such as a mixture of MDPV and α-PHiP (an alias for or 4-MeO-α-PVP).

The class of drugs McAfee seemed to prefer are known as "synthetic cathinones" (known in the common media as ) and are widely known to induce paranoid and/or psychotic effects. (These posts, if true, perhaps explained a lot of McAfee's bizarre behavior and rants.)

Cryptocurrency promotion
McAfee loved cryptocurrency. But what he really loved is when he got paid to love cryptocurrency, He charged $100,000 to send a single tweet endorsing an initial cryptocurrency coin offering.

"John McAfee’s tweets are by far the most influential in the field of cryptocurrency," the website says. "Few leaders in the Crypto community can come close to Mr. McAfee's reach into the heart of the cryptocurrency investor community."

In early 2016, McAfee became CEO of a company called MGT Capital Investments — a company previously aligned with online fantasy gaming, but at that time was merely a shell of a company, a penny stock with only a New York Stock Exchange listing going for it. McAfee proceeded to publicly re-brand the company as a cyber-security company with a specialty in Bitcoin mining (while, at the same time, privately working with other unscrupulous types who were engaging in an illegal pump and dump scheme with the stock.)

In July 2017, right in the middle of a speculative bubble building up for Bitcoin (that would peak in December 2017), McAfee promised to eat his own penis on live TV if the value of a single Bitcoin was not one million dollars by the end of 2020. This bravado played well with the cryptocurrency crowd, who themselves were engaged in plenty of "pump and dump"-type scams (due to the lawless nature of cryptocurrency, pump and dump scams were not explicitly illegal there). As a result, McAfee became a "go-to" figure for cryptocurrencies desiring to attract gullible investors with a celebrity endorsement.

In January 2018, McAfee abruptly left MGT Capital Investments. Later, as the started to take a dim view of celebrity-endorsed pump-and-dump cryptocurrency scams (eventually fining boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and musician DJ Khaled for failure to disclose promotional payments from ), McAfee stopped endorsing specific cryptocurrencies as well. Having said that, cryptocurrencies and blockchain continued to play an outsized in McAfee's Twitter feed (and his 2020 presidential campaign).

(As a side note, at the beginning of 2020, the price of a single Bitcoin was $7,541, about $992,459 dollars away from the number needed for McAfee to not eat his penis on live TV. So of course, true to his style, he reneged.)

Echoing the worst stereotypes about the cryptocurrency community, McAfee hated the IRS, claiming in tweets that he hadn't filed a tax return since 2011, and bizarrely likened the tax agency to the Nazi SS. He claimed to be "on the run" from the IRS and, for several months in 2019, was living on a boat, perhaps searching for libertarian paradise.

Criminal charges and death
On October 5, 2020, McAfee was indicted by US authorities for tax evasion. In the indictment, the Department of Justice claims that McAfee failed to file tax returns from 2014 to 2018 despite earning millions in income, allegedly evading his tax liability by "directing his income to be paid into bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchange accounts in the name of nominees." Also on October 5, 2020, a separate complaint was filed by the SEC against McAfee and his bodyguard that charged that, between 2017 and 2018, McAfee was recommending cryptocurrencies without disclosing that he was being paid (to the sum of more than $23 million) by the cryptocurrency companies to do so. McAfee also was accused of engaging in (a fraudulent form of market manipulation similar to a pump-and-dump scheme) with at least one digital currency. He was arrested in Spain one day later. Of course, the indictment and arrest did not stop McAfee from promoting shady cryptocurrencies over Twitter from his prison cell.

On March 5th, 2021, the Justice Department filed a second indictment against McAfee, charging McAfee with various commodity and securities frauds, including several charges of scalping, touting ICOs, and money laundering, along with another charge of failing to disclose promotional payments for a security. Ironically, McAfee, who described himself as a "leading digital security expert", had absolutely no problem (according to the complaint) using Twitter's "direct message (DM)" functionality to communicate his criminal activity. Twitter DMs have a big security flaw — they are not end-to-end encrypted. The DMs (along with some of McAfee's more egregious public tweets) thus gave the FBI plenty of material to build the criminal case on.

On June 23, 2021, hours after Spain's national court approved his extradition to the United States for the above tax and security crimes, McAfee was found dead in his prison cell, though not before he or someone on his team left a cryptic "Q" post on his Instagram. McAfee's death was later ruled a suicide.

…Politics?!
A stock-issue libertarian, McAfee supported a laissez-faire economic system, with all the positions that that mentality contains. This included support for "religious liberty", or the ability of businesses to discriminate based on their religious beliefs. On the other hand, he also supported the common libertarian positions of decriminalization of drug use, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and greater bulwarks against cyberwarfare.

He also supported abolishing the Transportation Security Administration, seeing them as "wasteful" — a claim perhaps somewhat supported by the fact that the TSA uses bloated McAfee software for cyber threat management.

Presidential runs
McAfee ran for President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2016. He lost the nomination to former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson.

Positioning himself as the "ultimate campaign platform" for the cryptocurrency community, McAfee ran for president again in 2020. This was despite McAfee being supposedly "on the run" from the IRS at the time.

Originally, McAfee planned to run his campaign from his yacht; however, McAfee decided on June 17th, 2019, to temporarily stake campaign headquarters in Havana, Cuba. What followed this was a bizarre globe-trotting adventure that read less like a presidential campaign and more like if Hunter S. Thompson started a world travel blog: getting arrested in the Dominican Republic over weapons charges, purported "hideouts" in Northern Iceland and Lithuania (with pictures of the Lithuanian hideout appearing to be a room actually lined in tin foil), and tweets from Siberia, the Pyrenees mountains, and Egypt.

Whale fucking
Some call me "Whale Fucker". Alright. There's a private club of a few dozen Maori men and one butch woman — that meet in Molokai each year to fuck a whale. True. Men on padeleboards [sic] herd the whale while one tries to fuck it. Wouldn't let me in the club. Tried it alone. Epic fail.

Paranoia and bullshit
McAfee's purported world was one where he was constantly on the run from the Belize government, who were out to kill him or capture him for his misdeeds in Belize. Anything could be linked to The Conspiracy, whether it be tailgaters, telephone solicitors, or even a cigarette lighter that McAfee himself dropped on the ground in a drunken state. Reality, of course, was often quite different from what McAfee claimed. For instance, in a Men's Health article, McAfee described having to flee his Portland condo due to The Conspiracy staking him out. The reality is, McAfee got evicted from the condo for merely refusing to pay the rent. In addition, when questioned on why the rent was 21 days past due, McAfee wrote a threatening letter to the landlord accusing him of being in a conspiracy to "collect" him and threatened the landlord with violence — enough to cause the landlord to seek a protective order.

Unfortunately, McAfee was a well-known attention-seeking "shitposter" (as an example, he was happy to tweet that he was basing his 2020 presidential campaign on, of all things, "anal fisting", before retracting this position shortly afterwards ). It is difficult, therefore, to tell how much of this was true, legitimate batshit ridiculous paranoia, how much of this was pure stunt… or how much of this was bad behavior that McAfee tries to cover up by claiming it is a "joke" or part of a conspiracy.

To be fair, a little paranoia is understandable when you are in an industry where notoriously sloppy security standards and mass electronic surveillance are legitimate concerns. Nonetheless, you never found McAfee addressing these sorts of concerns by, say, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to curb electronic surveillance excesses and promote better security practice. Instead, he used his cybersecurity cred to shill cryptocurrency on Infowars.

In short, whether he was legitimately paranoid or engaging in bullshit artistry (or both), he was a dick-ish shill, engaged in dick-ish stunts, for dick-ish reasons.