John Mcafee Net Worth: American technology entrepreneur John McAfee had a $4 million fortune at the time of his passing. As the founder and CEO of the antivirus software company McAfee, he first rose to fame and fortune. John McAfee’s net worth once exceeded $100 million, but he lost a significant amount of it as a result of poor investments and the global recession of 2008.
Later in life, John was involved in several legal disputes. He reportedly committed suicide on June 23, 2021, when he was 75 years old.
Early Years
On September 18, 1945, at a US Army base in Cinderford, England, John David McAfee was born. His father is an American soldier stationed at the base, and his mother is British. McAfee was raised in the American city of Salem, Virginia. He has claimed that he feels equally at home in Britain and America. When McAfee was fifteen years old, his violent alcoholic father shot himself to death. He studied at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1967. In 2008, he received an honorary Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) degree from the university.
Personal Life
McAfee was approached by a sex worker in South Beach, Miami, after he returned to the United States from Guatemala in December 2012 after being deported there. Janice Dyson, who was this woman, and McAfee started dating in 2012, and in 2013 they got married.
Career
In the years following his college graduation, McAfee worked at NASA’s Institute for Space Studies in New York City from 1968 to 1970. He worked on the program as a programmer. After leaving NASA, he worked as an operating system architect at Xerox and then as a software designer at Univac.
When McAfee joined the Computer Sciences Corporation as a software consultant in 1978, he made the switch to consulting. Then, from 1980 to 1982, he spent two years working for the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton.
When McAfee was employed by Lockheed in the 1980s, he started working on creating virus-fighting software. In particular, after receiving a copy of the Brain computer virus, he started developing antivirus software. McAfee quit his job in 1987 to launch his own computer anti-virus business, McAfee Associates.
The business was officially incorporated in the state of Delaware a few years later, in 1992. Before leaving the company in 1994, he worked there for two more years. After that, he became disinterested in the software industry two years after McAfee Associates went public and sold every share of the company for $100 million.
Network Associates was created in 1997 as a result of the merger of McAfee Associates and Network General. Network Associates changed its name to McAfee, Inc. seven years later.
Intel acquired McAfee Inc. in August 2010. Up until January 2014, when McAfee-related products started being marketed under the name Intel Security, it kept its branding distinct from that of Intel. The division formerly known as McAfee, Inc. was spun out of Intel in 2017 and renamed McAfee, LLC. This joint venture was between Intel and TPG Capital.
McAfee lost millions of dollars due to a string of poor investments, including a sizeable wager on Lehman Brothers’ bonds, and was compelled to sell his real estate and other assets for pennies on the dollar. For instance, McAfee received only $5.7 million for a $25 million Colorado estate. In addition, he sold a Cessna private jet, a ranch in New Mexico, and a mansion in Hawaii.
Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: “We’re coming for you McAfee! We’re going to kill yourself”. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn’t. I was whackd. Check my right arm.$WHACKD available only on https://t.co/HdSEYi9krq🙂 pic.twitter.com/rJ0Vi2Hpjj
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 30, 2019
Legal Concerns
In the past, McAfee lived in Orange Walk Town, Belize. The Gang Suppression Unit of the Belizean Police Department conducted a raid on his property in April 2012. Police detained McAfee for possessing an illegal weapon and manufacturing drugs, but he was later released without being charged.
In November of the same year, the Belizean police started looking into McAfee as a person of interest in connection with the slaying of an American ex-pat. On November 11, 2012, Gregory Viant Faull’s body was discovered in his Belizean residence. He was shot and passed away. McAfee had lived next door to Faull, which is why police were looking into his relationships with Faull.
After being sought out by police for questioning in connection with the murder of Faull, McAfee ultimately left Belize. On December 5, 2012, he was detained for entering Guatemala illegally after attempting to seek asylum in Guatemala City. His asylum application was turned down while he was being detained, so he was forced to wait for deportation in a Guatemalan detention facility.
McAfee was eventually released on December 6, 2012, and was returned to the United States by deportation from Guatemala after what ABC News claimed to be two minor heart attacks he had while being held in custody. Later, McAfee claimed he made up the heart attacks to buy time for his lawyer to submit an appeal on his behalf.
Since then, McAfee has encountered the law numerous times more. He was detained for drunk driving and having a firearm in his possession in Tennessee in August 2015. The wrongful death lawsuit against McAfee for Faull’s death in Guatemala was then refiled in November 2018 after the Circuit Court in Orlando, Florida, declined to dismiss it.
A Grand Jury was then called to indict him on tax-related charges after a second lawsuit was filed against him in the early months of 2019. Consequently, he declared in January 2019 that he was eluding American authorities and was residing on a boat.
Several more arrests have been made for him. He was detained in July 2019 while his yacht was docked in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. He was detained for four days before being let go.
He was detained in Spain in October 2020 as a result of a request for his detention from the American Department of Justice for tax evasion.
The Spanish government declared on June 23, 2021, that they would permit John’s extradition back to the United States. Tragically, later on, that day, John committed suicide. He was 75.
How Much is the Mcafee Company Worth in 2022?
In the final title card of the Netflix documentary, it is stated that the company still operating under the John McAfee name is valued at $14 billion as of 2022.
McAfee founded the company in 1987 but decided to leave it after only seven years. He stepped down as CEO in 1994 and later sold his stock for $100 million.
It was revealed in 2010 that Intel had acquired the business for a reported $7.68 billion.
Seven years later, Intel decided to divest the majority of its ownership in McAfee to investment firm TPG. McAfee was listed on the stock market in 2020 with an estimated market value of $8.6 billion based on the share price.
However, in March 2022, the Financial Post reported that McAfee had been sold to an investor group after two years on the stock exchange for an eye-popping $14 billion.
After premiering on August 24, 2022, Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee is now streaming on Netflix.
When Was Mcafee Arrested?
After being charged with tax evasion in Tennessee and cryptocurrency fraud in New York, McAfee’s years on the lam came to an end when he was apprehended at Barcelona airport on October 3, 2020, as he was about to board a flight to Istanbul, Turkey, according to Reuters.
In a statement released on October 5, 2020, Richard E. Zuckerman, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the US Justice Department’s tax division, stated that John David McAfee had been charged with tax evasion and willful failure to file tax returns in an indictment that had been unsealed today.
In addition to speaking engagements, consulting jobs, selling the rights to his life story for a documentary, and promoting cryptocurrencies, he also made millions of dollars from these endeavors.
McAfee allegedly failed to file tax returns from 2014 to 2018 despite earning a sizable amount of money from these sources.
Prosecutors claim that McAfee concealed assets, such as real estate, a car, and a yacht, in the names of others while instructing his income to be paid into bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchange accounts in the names of nominees.
Even though he acknowledged he had skipped paying taxes because they were “In his final tweet, sent on June 18 of last year, McAfee remained defiant, writing: “In a democracy, power is given, not taken. But it still has force. It serves no purpose for love, compassion, or caring. But it serves as fuel for envy, hostility, and greed. Power always corrupts. Be cautious about the authority you give a democracy.”
His wife, Janice McAfee, is left to care for McAfee, whose father also committed suicide when he was 15 years old.
What Happened to John Mcafee?
On 23 June 2021, 75-year-old John McAfee was discovered dead in a prison cell at the Brians 2 Penitentiary Centre near Barcelona, Spain. Shortly after the Spanish National Court authorized his extradition to the United States, he passed away.
John McAfee had been on the run for years before his arrest. The Netflix documentary follows McAfee as he flees from Belize police after being accused of murdering his neighbor.
Later, he was arrested in Guatemala for illegally entering the country. In 2012, he was released and deported to the United States after feigning a heart attack.
John, who believed that taxes were “illegal,” decided to run for president in 2016 and 2020 after returning to the United States.
John’s behavior became increasingly erratic and paranoid over time, and he frequently believed he was a “target” of the police.
John Mcafee: Cause of Death
The official cause of death of John McAfee was determined to be suicide by hanging. A suicide note was allegedly discovered in his pocket. According to the Catalan Department of Justice, “everything points to” his suicide by hanging, which was later confirmed by an official autopsy.
Janice, John’s wife, does not believe that he committed suicide and has been campaigning since July 2021 for an independent autopsy to be performed on his body to determine if the official cause of death can be contested or investigated privately.
Since John’s death on June 23, 2021, his body has been in the custody of the Spanish legal system. Janice has filed a petition to have John’s body returned to her.
Janice explained that he did not exhibit suicidal tendencies during their last conversation by saying, “His last words to me were, ‘I love you, and I will call you in the evening.’ These are not the words of a suicidal individual.
She also mentioned a tattoo that John got two years before his death and about which he tweeted, “Just in case, I got a tattoo today. If I commit suicide, I did not. I was pummelling. Examine my right arm.”
FAQs
Why was John McAfee on the run?
McAfee fled when local authorities sought him out as a “person of interest” in their investigation, claiming that he would be “silenced” if incarcerated. McAfee conducted interviews while on the run until he was captured and arrested in December in Guatemala.
Does McAfee justify its cost?
In general, McAfee’s antivirus scanner is among the best available. McAfee is an excellent choice for dependable protection against both known and zero-day threats, with perfect malware detection rates, quick scans, and simple scan scheduling.
What did John McAfee invent?
McAfee, a successful engineer in Silicon Valley at the time, devised a way to block the Brain virus, considered the first virus to target IBM PCs, in the 1980s, when personal computers were gaining popularity and malware was emerging. He deliberately infected his computer with the virus and then wrote a program to remove it.
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