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The Man Who Made McAfee Antivirus Software Has Lived The Most Ridiculous Life

The Man Who Made McAfee Antivirus Software Has Lived The Most Ridiculous Life

Today is John McAfee's 71st birthday.

George Pavlou

George Pavlou

John McAfee grew up in Virginia with an alcoholic father who committed suicide when he was just 15.

In college he turned to alcohol and, despite showing promise with his intellect, he became addicted to booze at a pretty young age. His first job was selling magazines door-to-door where he made a bit of cash.

He soon landed a job in the tech industry during the 60's but while working on the Missouri Pacific Railroad, he began dabbling in hard drugs. McAfee would apparently go on day-long LSD trips and was once found hiding behind a bin. Unsurprisingly, he was sacked.

It is suggested McAfee's life then took a turn for the worse and he now believes he lives in one giant hallucination and thinks that he'll one day wake up on his couch in St Louis.

Credit: PA

McAfee moved to Silicon Valley in the 70s and spent most of his days snorting cocaine and drinking scotch. After years of doing that, he decided to get sober. And in 1983 he managed it before landing a job at Lockheed. Computers were still pretty new at the time and the first computer viruses began hitting PCs in the mid-80s.

That's when he designed software to fight back and founded McAfee Anti-Virus, the company we know, and sort of love, today. Naturally, it made him millions.

In 1994 McAfee decided to resign from the company he'd founded and sold his shares so he could pursue other ventures. Only, those ventures involved some weird shit.

He kept a low profile for a little while, working on some personal projects and giving talks to young entrepreneurs, but in the 2000s, he lost a lot of money when the global economic crisis hit.

That's when he moved to Belize. There, he had wanted to get involved in the the world of antibiotics but soon found himself in a whole mess of crap. He lived with seven women, three of which supposedly wanted to kill him, and he returned to abusing drugs, specifically cocaine.

Paranoia set in and he thought he was being watched all the time so he started going to a place called Lover's Bar where he would sit and watch people go in and out. That's all he did for six months as he slowly but surely withdrew from everything else he was doing in Belize.


Then in 2012 he got caught up in a criminal investigation when his neighbour Gregory Faull was shot dead and, due to his history of drug and alcohol abuse, McAfee became the prime suspect. Like any innocent man would do, he fled to Guatemala.

He was eventually arrested after some Vice reporters published pictures of him with GPS coordinates attached to them. Guatemalan police picked him up and he was sent back to the US. In an attempt to clear everything up, he made this crazy parody YouTube video to try and explain what had been going on...

Since then, McAfee has apparently been holed up in Portland, Oregon, where every now and again he blogs about security, privacy and freedom.

However, on September 8, 2015, McAfee announced he would be trying to become the President of the United States. Quite a statement from a guy who's lived, you know, all that you've read above.

He was the only candidate for the newly-formed Cyber Party but because no one took him seriously, he became a candidate for the Libertarian Party.

Despite most people knowing about all the things we've spoken about in this article, McAfee consistently polled in the top three for his party.

His policies included decriminalisation of cannabis, ending the war on drugs, non-interventionism on foreign policy and an economy based on a free market that would not redistribute wealth and uphold free trade.


Last photo of Dr. Feldman with the candidates. Credit: Elle Imaging/Facebook

Given where he made his money, he also saw the importance of increasing cyber-security awareness. McAfee also said he'd grant full pardon to Edward Snowden.

He said in an interview he would break the age-old two-party system in American politics pretty simply.

"The perception that the two party system cannot be overcome is an illusion, and the illusion is propagated by those who look to history for advice rather than the exquisite beauty of the present moment.

"We are in the age of the Internet. We no longer must believe what others tell us. We no longer have to accept the polished, plastic debates of presidential candidates to help us decide who might better lead the country. We have the full knowledge of the world at our fingertips."

Unfortunately for McAfee, he lost out to Gary Johnson as the Libertarian Party's candidate for president and has since gone back to simply enjoying himself.

Whether with as many drugs and as much booze, we don't know. But he seems happy. Oh, and he's opened the 'School of Badass'. So there's that.

And that, lads, is the life and times of John McAfee - the bloke who brought us the most annoying anti-virus software the world has ever known.

Featured image credit: PA

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