The Infamy of a Crypto Rockstar: The Story of John McAfee

To some he was a rock star, and to others a freak promoting dodgy ICOs. At its peak, his company was one of the leading Bitcoin miners in the USA, but at the end of his life, McAfee had no cryptocurrency at all. His attitude to Bitcoin changed from “I’ll eat my dick if it doesn’t cost $1M in 3 years” to “it’s an old, clunky shitcoin.”

Meet John McAfee – one of the most controversial crypto industry players of the past decade. It’s been over a year since he passed, but court hearings in his case are still underway, just as discussions regarding his role in the crypto market. ChangeNOW discovers the life path of odious John McAfee – make yourself comfortable to hear his story.

“I have no idea how to uninstall this”

John McAfee was born in 1945 in the UK and raised in Virginia, where he lived with his father, an abusive alcoholic. The parent committed suicide when John was 15, so future entrepreneur was introduced to nightmares and alcohol addiction which have become his constant companions. Liquors were present in McAfee’s college life as well, but that didn’t stop him from getting a bachelor’s degree in math at the age of 22 and becoming one of the first programmers working for NASA and Xerox.

Tough childhood shaped the rebellious nature of the businessman – that’s how all John McAfee’s tattoos appeared: “I was told by my parents, my teachers, my church and my elders to never get a tattoo. I therefore got as many as my time would allow.”

At his young age, the entrepreneur used to sell newspapers door-to-door. He founded his first serious business when he was 39 – it was McAfee Associates, the company-developer of the first-ever commercial antivirus, the very one that you might have struggled to uninstall from your computer at some point. McAfee sold his share in that business in 1996, but the stigma of an annoying antivirus’ creator dragged behind him ever since. In 2013, he filmed a sarcastic video tutorial where he deleted the antivirus by shooting at the computer. When the program was sold and renamed Intel Security in 2011, McAfee said he felt “elated” for helping him distance from his brainchild. The antivirus was renamed back in 2017.

McAfee uninstalls McAfee. Image source

By 2007, McAfee had become a co-owner of several businesses and gained a $100M fortune. He gave advice to startups and lectured at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Sounds stable and predictable? Well, this is where the most interesting part begins.

A Failed Search For Peace

The 2008 economic crisis destroyed McAfee’s riches. When his net worth plunged to $4M, he sold all his luxury real estate and migrated to Belize, which was supposed to be a fresh start. But when the entrepreneur got involved in producing herbal antibiotics in a newly founded company, his childhood trauma manifested – McAfee started feeling like he was being followed all the time. Paranoia brought him back to alcohol addiction and made him quit his new venture, but it has also remained with him for the rest of his life: in 2018, McAfee will report being poisoned and won’t attend a blockchain conference due to supposed death threats.

Belize for McAfee was not only about spending days in a bar in fear for his life. Things got worse when the businessman’s neighbor was shot in 2014, and he became a suspect. After McAfee illegally fled to Guatemala, the Belize police arrested his house and auctioned off most of his art collection, while remaining property burned down under unknown circumstances.

"Everything I owned was in Belize. I left with nothing in my pocket,” said McAfee in an interview to Vice later that winter. And you could think this was the end of the story, but that wouldn’t be McAfee: the interview disclosed the businessman’s location, so the police tracked him down and arrested for illegally crossing the border. McAfee imitated two heart attacks in jail to increase his chances of getting a political asylum, but the plan failed, and the entrepreneur was deported to the U.S.

Besides McAfee’s participation in the 2016 Presidential race representing the Cyber party, the following period of his life was relatively calm. He lived in a Montreal apartment and discovered local restaurants and art galleries. McAfee’s wife Janice, whom he would later describe as his “inspiration, muse, friend, and a reason for living” while being in a Barcelona prison, spent her time with John in Montreal.

McAfee made ends meet by consulting tech firms and cybersecurity professionals. He said “he's no longer on the run from police and that he is just trying to live in peace,” CNN wrote about McAfee that day following an interview with him. “Still, he feels the occasional need to stoke a fire,” concluded the news service. And apparently, the stroke was not long in coming.

The Infamy

In 2016, McAfee became a CEO at MGT Capital Investments, a tech company based in the USA. The firm used to be involved in game development, but McAfee reoriented it into cybersecurity. MGT also became home to a Cryptocurrency Advisory Board that included a blockchain investor Roger Ver and the CEO of Shapeshift Erik Voorhees. McAfee said antiviruses were dead and the time for blockchain solutions had come. To gain experience in this field, MGT started to mine Bitcoin.

As an enthusiastic industry player, McAfee easily got involved in the ICO craze and entered leading positions in a few crypto startups. This move might have been part of their promo campaigns – McAfee’s new positions were carefully covered in the entrepreneur's social media. His typical tweet from those years was an outright shilling of a new coin that was supposed to “change the world.”

McAfee at one of his numerous interviews. Image source

McAfee was accused of promoting sketchy ICO projects, but one day, he stopped hiding. The businessman admitted that one tweet about the new project would cost $105k. The so-called McAfee Team ran this project and wrote about it on their website, where you can still find a list of “partner projects” – ICOs that never went live. The Team claimed that McAfee’s tweets were the most influential across the industry, and an investigation by Vice showed that the businessman did that at least for half a year, which helped pump the tokens’ value for 50–350% in the short term.

Many crypto enthusiasts roasted McAfee for insider trading and unfair play, but the businessman pushed back. He said that 195 of 200 ICOs that his team reviewed had been rejected after an audit. Things turned more serious when the SEC recognized tokens as securities and ICO as their unregistered sale. McAfee criticized this decision but then immediately stopped promoting ICOs because he “had to obey the law.” Later, the entrepreneur’s projects were charged with pump-and-dump schemes and ICO tweets that misled people.

In 2017, McAfee stepped down as CEO and took the chief cybersecurity position at MGT. In 2018, he left the company – rumors had it investors wanted to distance the company from McAfee’s reputation.

“Not my fault”

The reputation was not affected by McAfee’s sketchy promos only – it involved other awkward situations as well. In 2018, McAfee promised $250 thousand to anyone who would hack his Bitfi cold wallet. Two weeks later, a 15-year-old attacker managed to do so, which the company admitted, but never sent the money to the bounty winner.

A bigger budget was involved in 2019, when McAfee started developing and promoting Zombiecoin for $4.5M. After receiving the money, the entrepreneur said it was a “shitcoin” and disappeared, later being threatened by a $100 million lawsuit.

Zombiecoin was not the only cryptocurrency called a “shitcoin” by McAfee. In July 2017, he made his famous prediction that if Bitcoin doesn’t reach $1 million by 2020, he would “eat his dick on national television.” Once the forecast apparently failed, McAfee said “it was a joke to attract new users to crypto.” By that time, he had become much less enthusiastic about the first cryptocurrency. Here’s one of the things he said in his Twitter: “Bitcoin is a shitcoin — old, clunky, with no security, no smart contracts, no DAPs.” McAfee called it an “ancient technology” that would be replaced by new cryptocurrencies. Probably by those he promoted.

Yachts And Despair

McAfee never hesitated to share some of his most controversial thoughts with his audience: in 2019, the businessman admitted he hadn’t been paying taxes for 8 years because he considered them “illegal”. It’s no surprise he was forced to flee – McAfee hid on his own yacht from the IRS and their accusations of tax evasion.

McAfee wanted to repeat his after-escape game of running for President again (this time from the Libertarian party), but in 2020, the 74-year-old businessman was detained in Spain upon a request by the United States Department of the Treasury. Why was John McAfee in jail? It turned out that in 2016–2018, McAfee didn’t pay taxes from $23 millions made while promoting cryptocurrencies, lecturing, and selling the rights to film a documentary about his life.

Was John McAfee murdered?

After his arrest in 2020, McAfee said he was “content and had friends”, and “good is good, all is well.” In 2021, the entrepreneur said that nothing remained of his cryptocurrency holdings. On June 23 that year, the Spanish Court agreed to extradite McAfee to the USA, where he was facing up to 100 years of imprisonment for tax evasion, insider trading, and fraud. A few hours after this decision had been announced, McAfee's dead body was found in his cell.

An investigation showed it was a suicide, but shortly before John McAfee’s death, he wrote: “If I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.” There was also John McAfee’s tattoo saying “$WHACKD” – in 2019, the businessman got it and told that if he’d ever reportedly kill himself, that would not be true. McAfee’s lawyer said his defendant “died by hanging as his nine months in prison brought him to despair.”

While many trust the officially reported John McAfee death cause, others claim that John McAfee death could not be a suicide. While some say he got what he deserved, others argue that the authorities treated him too harshly given his age. McAfee’s whole life is a controversy, and one’s judgment about it depends fully on their values and beliefs. We can’t definitely even say if the businessman did a great job promoting cryptocurrency or rather contributed to its mixed reputation. His life is an example of how there is no black and white – but any line of actions and choices is naturally followed by consequences.