
John McAfee (18 September 1945 – 23 June 2021) was a British-American businessman and Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020.
Biography[]
John David McAfee was born in Cinderford, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England in 1945 to a US Army soldier and his English wife, and he was raised in Salem, Roanoke County, Virginia; despite this, he claimed to feel as much British as he did American. He worked for NASA's Institute for Space Studies in New York City from 1968 to 1970 before becoming a software designer and a consultant. While working for Lockheed, he became a software developer with an interest in combating viruses, and he founded McAfee Associates Inc. in 1987, selling his last stakes in the company in 1994. He called his software the "worst software on the planet" and was glad when Intel acquired McAfee in 2010 and renamed it to "Intel Security" in 2014 before a demerger led to the software being renamed to "McAfee" once more. The Great Recession of 2007-2008 led to McAfee's wealth plummeting from $100 million to $4 million. McAfee soon turned to politics as a libertarian, warning against the use of smartphone apps due to surveillance concerns, supporting the mining of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, advocating the decriminalization of marijuana, supporting an end to the War on Drugs, supporting a non-interventionist foreign policy, supporting a free market economy which did not redistribute wealth, supported free trade, and supported increased cyber awareness. He ran for President in 2016 and 2020, losing the Libertarian Party's primaries both times. McAfee called himself a "prime target" of the Internal Revenue Service after admitting, in 2019, that he had not paid income taxes since 2010, calling taxes "illegal". In 2012, while living in Belize, McAfee was accused of murdering his neighbor, who was found dead from a gunshot wound at McAfee's home. McAfee fled Brazil rather than cooperate with the investigation, but he was arrested in Guatemala and deported from Belize to the United States. In 2019, he fled to Spain in an act of blatant tax evasion, only to be arrested in Spain on 5 October 2020. On 23 June 2021, the Audiencia Nacional authorized his extradition to America to face tax evasion charges in Tennessee, but, rather than face a prison sentence in America, he apparently committed suicide in his Barcelona prison cell. Several conspiracy theories emerged following his death, in the style of Jeffrey Epstein, as he had repeatedly warned that, if he was ever found dead by hanging, it was murder, and his lawyer claimed that McAfee had never displayed suicidal intent to him during their last phone calls.