The tattoo kind of said it all. In Cambrils, a beach community on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, Santiago Cuevas had already closed his shop, Scorpio Tattoo, for the 2019 holidays when a pushy customer talked his way in. The guy knew exactly what he wanted: a simple tat across the area just over his right bicep that read “$WHACKD.” He said it symbolized a desire “to know that I’m alive.” Cuevas and the man chatted amiably for the hour or so the job took. “He never told me who he was,” Cuevas recalls. “I found that out the following year.”
This was John McAfee, the software pioneer and supposed centimillionaire who, by the time he was sitting in Cuevas’s chair, had been broke and on the run for the better part of a decade. In the 1980s and ’90s he was a computing entrepreneur mentioned in some circles in the same breath as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He largely persuaded the emerging personal-computing industry first to fear holes in its security, then to outsource its defenses to him. By the end of that period, he’d cashed out and turned to rich-guy vanity projects. In the 21st century, however, his life began to unravel. He was named in a wrongful death lawsuit. His fortune seemed to evaporate overnight. On the run in Belize, he faced accusations of rape and murder. And by the time he met Cuevas in late 2019, he’d begun his final run from the law.
McAfee was given to brash hype and to conspiracy theories. Besides the hakuna matata explanation he gave Cuevas, $WHACKD was both a reference to his cryptocurrency token and a signal to truther types that there was a plot afoot to murder him. McAfee compared himself to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. “Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine,” he tweeted in October 2020. That same month, immigration officers at Barcelona-El Prat Airport arrested him on an international warrant for tax evasion and held him without bail. On June 23, 2021, several hours after being informed of his extradition to the US, he was found hanging in his prison cell. The Spanish authorities ruled his death a suicide. To McAfee’s followers, Cuevas’s tattoo became a totem, proof that powerful people had wanted to silence him and he wouldn’t go quietly.
That was never McAfee’s style. No matter how wild the other characters around him, he made himself the center of attention. Some of this was because of the mountains of drugs and alcohol he openly consumed, but he had an undeniable magnetism, too. “He always had an entourage around him, and people elevated him to this cultlike status,” says Joy Athanasiou, a friend of and lawyer for McAfee’s daughter, Jen.
McAfee also lied a lot, sometimes compulsively, making it tough to untangle his often bizarre final years. Loved ones and colleagues describe him as an enigma who could be lucid and urbane one moment, then paranoid and even psychotic the next.
“It was like working for Stalin or Hitler or something,” says Jimmy Watson Jr., McAfee’s former bodyguard and business partner. “He was always watching me and watching everybody.”
“I never trusted him ever,” says Barbara Doepke, McAfee’s ex-fiancée. “We’d go to a restaurant, and he could be in the back with the waitress, f---ing her in the bathroom.”
Jen McAfee says her dad was “not the type of person you want in charge of your own biography.”
Everyone in McAfee’s orbit who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek for this story had a different theory about precisely who he was. But along with his penchant for hyperbole, the thread that runs through the good and bad times is paranoia. He built his fortune on it: The cybersecurity industry, worth billions of dollars a year, trades in fears that often prove to be exaggerated. McAfee is as responsible for that model as anyone.
McAfee was a Silicon Valley tycoon, a party animal, a spiritual guru, an international fugitive, a prophet of cybersecurity and Bitcoin and an alleged murderer and rapist. As his story grew darker, he also became a sort of beacon of QAnon-style misinformation and disinformation. At times, he said as much: that he was trying to create a whole alternate reality. No matter his wealth or charisma, though, there were some truths he couldn’t outrun.
When McAfee told his own life story, he began with his father’s violent alcoholism. “Nobody has an ideal life,” he said in a 2017 interview with ABC News. “Even children.” His dad was an American soldier based in southwest England during World War II. His British mother, Joan Williams, gave birth to McAfee about two weeks after V-J Day in 1945. The family soon moved to the US, settling in Salem, Virginia. McAfee described his dad as a mean drunk who abused him and his mom, right up until he shot himself when McAfee was 15. McAfee’s first wife, Fran, says he was haunted by his father’s abuse. “John had a tremendous volatile temper,” she says. “It comes from what happened to him during those years.”
From an early age, McAfee evinced a grandiose confidence in his facility with math, combined with a whatever-it-takes attitude toward life. He dealt cocaine in college, according to his ABC interview. He met Fran when he was in grad school for math. She was one of his 18‑year‑old students, and he was fired after their relationship became known. By the late 1960s, however, his career was on the rise. He’d worked for Xerox, Univac, Siemens, Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin and NASA. Later, he’d exaggerate his status and impact at more than one of these places. He claimed to have worked on satellite encryption and a key data processing project for the Apollo program. Other NASA veterans, including engineer Jim Cameron, say he did no such things.
Yet by the 1980s, McAfee had begun to make a name for himself in Silicon Valley. He became the head of research and development at Omex, an early data storage company, meaning he designed software for its operating systems. He stood out, recalls his boss, Rebecca Costa. “I remember looking out of my office window and seeing this guy drive up in a motorcycle with a black Michael Jackson-looking leather jacket,” she says. “You might as well have introduced me to an alien.” The day was already half over, so she noted that their meeting had been scheduled for 8 a.m. “And he said, ‘Yeah, but I was hung over.’ ”
Costa says she couldn’t trust McAfee to meet deadlines or budgets, but the work was worth it. “It took me all of 15 minutes in the R&D lab to realize he was brilliant,” she says. “I didn’t care if he set up a bar in R&D and drank all day long. If he could solve the kinds of technical problems he was solving, then he was my guy.”
A couple of years later, McAfee left to seek greater fortunes. At McAfee Associates, founded in 1987, his chaotic style was built into the culture. He later claimed he created his eponymous antivirus software in a day and a half, as a way to fight an early virus that was on the rise, and that he had 4 million users within a month. Some of his reach came from stunts, like a truck he drove to customers’ offices that resembled the Ghostbusters ambulance. But the antivirus software was also legit. “It was the gold standard,” says Paul Ferguson, who’s worked in cybersecurity for more than 30 years. “If there was a detection on McAfee, you pretty much could feel confident in the fact that it was not false positive.”
At first, McAfee’s software was free for home PCs, and he only charged businesses. To increase interest among both audiences, he became a media fixture, working the idea of computer viruses into the public consciousness. In 1992 a virus called Michelangelo was McAfee’s big break. It was said to infect a computer but remain dormant until March 6, the artist’s birthday, before erasing all data on the device. While peers estimated the number of infected machines in the thousands, McAfee told reporters the total could be as many as 5 million, representing tens of millions of dollars in losses. The lower estimates proved correct, but the public alarm sent sales of antivirus software spiking.
It’s tough to overstate how ubiquitous McAfee antivirus software became in this era. Just about every time you logged in to a Windows PC, you’d see the Windows logo, then McAfee’s software, scanning. That little shield was always running in the corner of the screen, as familiar to people of a certain age as modem bleeps and hisses or the words “you’ve got mail.”
By then, though, McAfee was out of the company. He’d been relegated to the position of chief technology officer because venture capitalists were readying the company to go public. The adults brought in to manage the place had their fill of McAfee’s office culture, which included sex-in-the-office competitions and parties that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in The Wolf of Wall Street. “John was an amazing technical genius, but he wasn’t a leader,” says Andrea Nation, one of those adults. “He couldn’t take the company to the next level.” Nation, who recalls cleaning bodily fluids off of desks, says McAfee was ready to cash out. He stepped down as an employee in 1993 and as a board member in ’95, walking away with cash disbursements and stock sales totaling at least $84 million. It wasn’t enough.
In 2006, after some years on a Colorado estate that he’d turned into a yoga retreat, McAfee formed a club for a new hobby he called aerotrekking. It’s the art of flying an ultralight aircraft really low to the ground. The planes have an engine but no cockpit, run on fuel and often have fabric wings. They’re meant to be nimble enough to skim along canyon walls, treetops and mountainsides. They also leave the pilot entirely exposed.
McAfee spent about $11 million building an aerotrekking complex on his 157‑acre property in New Mexico, created a business called Southwest Aerotrekking Academy and advertised rides. For a time the place, which had its own cafe, general store and movie theater, seemed like a fantastical, adrenaline-fueled oasis. But then one morning in November 2006, two aerotrekkers—including McAfee’s nephew, one of the academy’s instructors—crashed and died in nearby Starvation Canyon. In 2008 the family of the other aerotrekker sued McAfee, the academy and his nephew’s father. A year later, McAfee sold off assets and fled to Belize. He spent years ignoring court orders and dodging process servers at tech conferences, and though the court awarded about $2.2 million to the dead aerotrekker’s family, McAfee never paid them. “He was very arrogant and contemptuous of the process,” says Frank Fleming, an attorney for the family.
In Belize, things got darker. McAfee bought conspicuous supplies of drugs and guns. He hired bodyguards and took up with teenage girlfriends. He hired a research biologist away from Harvard University to work on developing natural antibiotics and topical medicines, but she quit and later alleged that he drugged and raped her. (McAfee denied this and was never charged.) An anti-gang police unit raided his compound, and though the raid didn’t end in charges, it deepened his bouts of paranoia. In 2012, when Belizean authorities sought to question him about the murder of his American expat neighbor, he fled to Guatemala.
Jailed for entering Guatemala illegally, McAfee claimed to reporters, with zero evidence, that he’d been framed by the Belizean prime minister, who he said had ordered opponents’ murders. For a while his allegations managed to overshadow the actual killing. Instead of being extradited to Belize for questioning, McAfee was deported back to the US. A Florida civil court ordered him to pay $25 million to the neighbor’s family, but he didn’t.
In the US, McAfee had a minor renaissance. He met his final wife, Janice McAfee, when she was a sex worker. (They later divorced but remained partners.) He made some money from speaking fees; became a brief YouTube hit with a video filled with guns, women and a snortable white powder; and ran for president in 2016, as a Libertarian. After that reentry to the national stage, he began hawking cryptocurrencies, which got him into trouble again.
Watson, his former bodyguard and business partner, says McAfee promoted crypto coins on Twitter for money. Although it’s not illegal to do a sponsorship or a promotional deal with crypto companies, traditional securities require you to disclose those business relationships if you want to avoid fraud charges. McAfee would become a regulatory test case for treating crypto like a security subject to the same disclosure rules.
Separately, in late 2018, McAfee got word that the federal government was investigating him for tax evasion and planned to press charges. In January 2019 he and Janice sailed his boat from Miami to the Caribbean. He made this recording that was played to an audience on a crypto-themed cruise: “I’m very sorry I cannot be with you enjoying this wonderful cruise that you’re on. The reason I’m not with you is, had I attempted to go, I would’ve been picked up by Interpol and carted off back to America to face charges for tax evasion. It is true, I have not paid taxes in eight years. I have not filed taxes in eight years. I will not file taxes again.”
McAfee and Janice fled to the Bahamas, then the Dominican Republic, where they wound up in jail because their boat was loaded with guns, drugs, cash and bricks of gold. McAfee managed to use his dusty UK dual citizenship to get them deported to pre-Brexit Europe rather than the US. By October 2019 they’d made their way to Spain, where he gave a speech at the Barcelona Blockchain Week conference. In December one of his Twitter followers asked what he was doing in Catalonia. McAfee posted a photo of himself in the Mediterranean town of Salou. Over the ensuing months, he revealed his movements to careful observers via tweets.
McAfee made an uncharacteristically humble life for himself in Cambrils. He ate regularly at a sushi restaurant called Katori without bragging about his exploits to the staff. During Covid‑19 lockdowns, however, when Spain was hit hard, he made a sport of defying restrictions. He tweeted videos of himself at a Cambrils beach and a park, as well as a photo of himself peeing in a McDonald’s parking lot. Janice confirms he was staying about a mile outside town, at an abandoned hotel called Daurada Park.
The hotel last operated in an official capacity in 2017, according to TripAdvisor reviews. During a visit last year, the roof of the main entrance was falling down, but people were clearly still living there. On the balconies were tables with healthy plants and diligent mosquito netting. From at least 2018 to 2020, according to local news reports, Daurada was used as an unlikely crypto mine.
Janice, who’s been moving around Spain, is cagey about her time there. She says she has worried for her safety, has been followed while shopping and doesn’t know whom to trust. “I just don’t want to go into details about Spain,” she says. “The friends assisting John—there was an expectation of privacy.” She says their collaboration with these associates dated to at least 2018, when he recorded the crypto cruise video. Watson, who also spent time with McAfee in Spain, is similarly tight-lipped about the experience. “I don’t want to get too far into that, just to protect myself,” he says.
In the summer of 2020, McAfee tweeted a video of two Russian speakers teaching him and Janice language basics at a bar. From what Businessweek could gather, though, these weren’t powerful gangsters with connections in Russia. They just seemed to be trying to make some quick money from crypto.
The crypto operation gave McAfee enough cash to keep traveling—and tweeting angrily about Covid restrictions. He posted photos of himself wearing lacy women’s underwear on his face instead of a mask. He introduced body doubles he claimed had been arrested for violating the rules. Google notified him and Janice that it had released data from their accounts in response to legal action from the US Internal Revenue Service, but he continued to post videos of himself playing the harmonica and whinging about US foreign policy or ex-girlfriends. Then, on Oct. 3, he was arrested on an international warrant for tax evasion.
McAfee was apprehended in Barcelona, where his passport was flagged when he tried to board a flight to Istanbul. He was remanded to a local prison, a sprawling complex of green-roofed barns. The US Securities and Exchange Commission also slapped him and Watson with a fraud charge that would eventually total $13 million. A federal judge later ordered Watson, who returned to the US and was arrested, to pay almost $400,000 in fines and banned him from trading digital securities.
McAfee hired several attorneys for the legal fight ahead. And, of course, he also kept tweeting. Janice says he was allowed to speak on the phone three times a day for eight minutes per call. She’d read him the news, and he’d dictate tweets. About three weeks after his arrest, she posted a lengthy audio recording he made from prison. “I love you all and I miss being able to share videos and photos with you,” he said. “I may even get out on bail in a week or two, and if not, I will eventually be freed here.”
Later messages were less rosy. In poetry he likewise dictated to Janice to tweet, he grew ruminative. “My body is confined,” he said. “My mind has always been confined by fears, longings, ambitions, escapes from boredom. A prisoner of my own desires, circumstance, move me from one prison to the other. There’s little difference.”
Video of McAfee’s extradition hearing on June 15, 2021, shows him speaking to the court through a translator. He says that he didn’t pay taxes because the IRS is corrupt and that he ran for president to expose that corruption. He’s lost weight and is hunched over. “If I am extradited to the US, please translate, I will most certainly spend the rest of my life in prison,” he says. “I would ask the court to take all of these statements into consideration. Thank you.” A week later the Spanish court granted the US extradition request.
Janice spoke to McAfee on the morning of June 23, just after he returned from court. She says that while he wasn’t happy about the decision, he’d been prepared for it, and his lawyers were already working on his appeal. Yet that evening, according to the national press, guards opened the door to McAfee’s cell and found him hanging from the window. He died soon after, at age 75. On Twitter, Janice posted the note that a prison officer reported finding in McAfee’s pocket. It reads: “I am a phantom parasite. I want to control my future, which does not exist.”
Several people close to McAfee say the note’s handwriting and style are definitely his. The coroner ruled the death a suicide, as did a judge who reviewed the case. The circumstances, however, played perfectly to McAfee’s conspiracy-minded fan base. He’d been saying for years he was wanted, that people were out to see him $WHACKD.
Janice says she believes someone drugged and strangled her partner and ex-husband. She wasn’t allowed to see his body right away, and when she was, she was kept separated from it by glass. This was likely because of Covid restrictions, but it compounded her belief in a cover-up. “When they found him, he was breathing and he had a heartbeat,” she says. McAfee attorney Nishay Sanan also believes it wasn’t a suicide. “It wasn’t John’s personality to do something like this,” he says. “The timing of it is suspicious. The way it supposedly happened is suspicious.”
The Spanish authorities declined to comment for this story beyond the judge’s ruling of suicide, citing the privacy laws that protect information related to McAfee’s medical history in prison and the investigation of his death.
McAfee’s body remains in a morgue in Barcelona. His Spanish lawyer, Javier Villalba, says Janice is appealing the judicial ruling of suicide to a higher court. As long as the case is open, his remains can’t go anywhere for burial. Janice and the attorneys say he didn’t leave an estate, but McAfee’s indictment for tax evasion alleges he had a history of buying assets in other people’s names. Janice says she’s comfortable, and Sanan says: “We always got paid when money was due.”
Jen McAfee has said she has no interest in further investigation of her father’s death or assets. She would, however, like his body laid to rest. Jen has been deluged by people telling her they’ve spotted McAfee in Texas. But she knew him longer than just about anyone, and she witnessed both his public and private self-destruction. “There were times in the last few years where they had conversations and it was apparent that he was not sober, and of course he could be very dismissive,” says Jen McAfee’s lawyer, Joy Athanasiou. “That’s an effect of drinking and of addiction, sadly.”
McAfee set out to defy the example his father set for him, but in the end, his drinking and substance abuse, his volatile temper, the strained relationship with his daughter—all seem to point to the same destination. It also fits that a man who believed he couldn’t be made to do anything he didn’t want to do went down for something as simple as tax evasion. And maybe the humiliating prospect of being forced to pay his debts and spend his final years in prison was something his arrogance couldn’t tolerate.
Nearly every source for this story says they had at some point felt manipulated by McAfee, conned, betrayed. That he was the ultimate hype man who could sell anyone anything. Without him, software companies might’ve had to make their own products more secure and been better prepared for threats worse than dot-com-era viruses. But McAfee didn’t thrive in a vacuum. Like so many founders who became very rich and very famous very quickly, he had many enablers who helped fuel his belief in his own hype and his life beyond the law. Together, they blurred the line between reality and the fantasy world where he ruled.
McAfee’s final con was on his conspiracy-minded followers. He’d promised that a flood of embarrassing and dangerous information would be released upon his death, a so-called dead man’s switch. No such data trove has ever emerged. The rumor did, however, keep his mythos alive a little longer—lingering like that little shield in the corner of the screen. —With Hannah Miller and Shawn Wen
This story is based in part on the new season of the Bloomberg podcast Foundering. For the full audio, visit bloomberg.com/foundering or your favorite podcast app.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
