The Inglorious End of John McAfee

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What kind of man, while being pursued by authorities for alleged crimes ranging from tax evasion to murder, tries to tweet through it? 

John McAfee, the late tech titan, misinformation peddler and crypto enthusiast, was such a man. In this week’s Businessweek—and the new season of Bloomberg’s narrative podcast, Foundering—we take a look at what made McAfee a pioneer in cybersecurity, and what made him such a destructive force in the lives of almost everyone he touched. 

As Jamie Tarabay and Matthew Bremner write, McAfee’s troubles began in childhood. He had an abusive father, a former soldier whose rage imprinted itself on his son at a young age. Per Tarabay and Bremner:

When McAfee told his own life story, he always started it the same way: 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 moved to the US not long after, 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.”

The young McAfee showed an aptitude for math and incredible recklessness: His first wife was an 18-year-old student when they met while he was in grad school, and the school fired him when they found out. He blew through jobs at places like Xerox, Univac, Siemens, Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin and NASA in the 1960s, before coming into his own in Silicon Valley in the early ’80s. One former colleague at a data storage company, Rebecca Costa, remembers him thusly:

Costa says she could never trust McAfee to meet deadlines or stay within budget, 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.”

Then, of course, came the business that his name is still attached to: computer security. It’s impossible to overstate the presence of McAfee antivirus systems in computers in the late ’80s and ’90s. Because he gave the program away free to individuals (he charged businesses) it was everywhere—the small shield always present in the bottom right corner of your screen. When he left the company he founded in 1995 for $84 million in stock and cash disbursements, he could’ve spent the rest of his life comfortably enjoying his mountain of money. But that wasn’t John McAfee.

What happens next—all of it—is hard to believe. You’ll have to read the whole storylisten to the podcast), but suffice to say that the sins of the father never really left the son. His rise and attenuated fall encompasses the excesses of multiple decades—drug use, tech idolatry, misinformation, crypto swindles, violence and sexual predation. His need for attention, though, might have been the appetite that, in the end, became his biggest liability. When the US government is looking for you, maybe stop posting pictures on social media. Reyhan Harmanci, Businessweek

LISTEN: Start the Foundering podcast today!

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