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In the 2008 financial crash, McAfee was reported to have lost most of his fortune, and auctioned off his holdings, including the Colorado estate, to move to Belize. As his then long-term girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin, said: “John has always been searching for something.” He bought property in desirable locations such as Hawaii and New Mexico, founded a flight school and invested in a start-up antivirus firewall company, Zone Labs. He was divorced from his second wife, Judy, an air hostess whom he married in his early McAfee Associates years and who had helped build the company, in 2002. In 2000, as the world panicked about the Y2K threat, McAfee bought 280 acres in Colorado, built an estate and started a yoga retreat he also wrote four guides to spirituality.

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That year, too, he founded Tribal Voice, which designed an early messaging system, PowWow, for Windows he sold that in 1999. The next year, he stepped down as chief executive, and in 1994 he sold out his stake. He stoked fears about the Michelangelo virus in 1992, just when his rapidly growing company was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, immediately making his holding worth $80m. Stunts such as creating a mobile antivirus van helped bring national notoriety, as did his writing a book warning of the virus threat. Starting McAfee Associates from his home, he created an antivirus that he gave away to users, hoping correctly that it would build a market to sell licences to business. He immediately grasped how the virus worked and created a programme to neutralise it. In the mid-1980s he had a steady job and security clearance at Lockheed, when he read an article about the Pakistani Brain computer virus. He landed in Silicon Valley, where, after a breakdown at work, he joined AA.

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In 1969, as a teaching assistant studying for a PhD in mathematics at Northeast Louisiana State College, he was fired for sleeping with one of his students, which led to his first, short-lived marriage.Īdept at programming the key-punch machines of the day, he moved through a series of jobs and a growing dependency on alcohol and drugs. McAfee put himself through Roanoke College and discovered an ability to con people with a simple, direct approach, selling “free” magazine subscriptions that required substantial payments for postage. McAfee later said: “Every relationship I have, every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust.” But Don was an abusive alcoholic, and took his own life when John was 15. The family returned to Don’s home of Roanoke, Virginia, where he worked as a road surveyor and Joan as a bank teller. He was born in Cinderford, Gloucestershire, where his father, Don, stationed at a US Army base in during the second world war, met his English mother, Joan (nee Williams). McAfee’s rise to riches came unexpectedly on the crest of the internet wave, but the chaos of his earlier life prefigured what would follow. He died immediately after a Spanish court granted a US extradition request. Yet he returned to the US, built another fortune and entered politics, before again going on the run, this time to avoid US authorities indicting him for tax evasion and fraud.

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