It's torture. It torture is my mind, you know, I don't know. It's just hard to move forward. It's hard to think about anything else because I just won't have him and take him and lay him to rest as he asked. That's Janice Dyson McAfee. She was the last woman married to John McAfee, the anti virus software pioneer, before he died. When we spoke to her, his body was still laying in the morgue in Spain. Even a year later, she still clearly remembered the moment she found out about his death. And then I saw the news. Um, yeah, I just kind of broke down, you know, and I was, you know, kind of inconsolable for a while and just um, really in disbelief. John McAfee has been found dead in a Spanish prison cell, shortly after it was announced he would be extradited to the US to face charges of financial crimes. The founder of the anti virus saw where that bears his name, had just been ordered extradite into the United States on tax evasion charges. He was seventy five and a wild ride of a life. It was that was June one, inside the cell of a prison just outside Barcelona. Medics tried and failed to resuscitate him. McAfee was arrested in Barcelona as he was about to board a flight to Istanbul in October. In a tweet posted June tenth, McAfee told his one million Twitter followers quote there is much sorrow in prison disguised as hostility. Janna said that McAfee was allowed to make three eight minute phone calls a day from prison, so she talked to him all the time, and she was stunned by the news. I was trying to make arrangements to um go and see his body, and and and get his things from the prison, and just understand how it was that, you know, the world had found out before I did, her, before his attorney did. She was also living in Spain. She made her way over to the prison in front of a group of reporters. She said, he would never have done this, but he's a fighter. He's always a fighter, and anybody that knows John, that knows him even a little bit, knows that about him. He would never quit this way. He would never take his life in this way. She didn't believe that her partner would kill himself and that feeling only became stronger when she went to view the body. So I came into the room and there was um, you know, glass window in between and he was there and on the bourney, and so I couldn't see anything. He was completely completely covered. Um they had a sheet and a blanket wrapped over him, over top of him. Genesis suspicions seemed to add fuel to the conspiracy theories that were already beginning to take off. He would want his death to be a subject of great speculation. He was a He was a wild character. He had a tattoo that said whacked to remind people that if he was found to commit suicide, that he didn't do it. Oh, man, I wonder in this if the joke is actually on us. The comparisons to Jeffrey Epstein came quickly. McAfee claimed that, like Epstein, he too was the target of powerful people who wanted him silenced. Maybe those comparisons were inevitable. Both men died in jail awaiting trial, and McAfee stoked those conspiracy theories himself. In October, he tweeted from prison, I'm contenting here. I have friends, The food is good all as well know that if I hang myself allah Epstein, it will be no fault of mine. McAfee's death raised a host of other questions. He was staying in a hotel owned by Russians that had previously been rated by the police. Who was he working with there? Why was he even in Spain? Anyway? We went to Barcelona and Cambriel's looking for answers. We thought talking to one of the people closest to McPhee would help, but Jana's only deep in the mystery. Here's contributing reporter Matthew Bremner. What kind of things were you doing? Um, you know, how long are you there for? Roughly? In general terms? No, I just I just don't want to go into details about, you know, the I really don't want to get into dates and time period. The hotel where you were reportedly staying was also a crypto mine that was owned by Russians. Can you confirm and deny that? Okay? I can either confirm nor deny that, okay. But what we're I mean it's I mean, obviously on John's Twitter there are videos with him appearing with Russians, So I mean something that's in the public sphere, something in the public record. I'm not trying to I'm not gonna catch out here, I understand, but but I I enjoy breathing. Um. I don't want that to to stop happening. Yeah. No matter what you believe, whether you think his death was an international conspiracy or a desperate suicide, John McAfee's death in a Spanish jail was a pitiful end to the life of a one time cybersecurity pioneer, someone whose name was synonymous with network security, someone who was considered a technical genius before McAfee was an alleged criminal. He was an entrepreneur who helped build an industry that's now a pillar of Silicon Valley. It's a story that's been mostly forgotten in the deluge of salacious news that followed. But McAfee started from nothing and essentially kickstarted the modern cybersecurity business. It's hard to overstate how ubiquitous McAfee Anti virus soft where was for decades. Just about every time you logged onto a computer, first you see the Windows logo, then you see McAfee anti virus software scanning, always running in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. McAfee built a piece of software that dominated the technology industry in the eighties and nineties. Like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, he was a leading tech founder of his day. Unlike so many of his peers, McAfee had a public personality and a profile, appearing frequently on television introducing audiences to the concept of a computer virus. John McAfee was a walking embodiment of the early Internet industry, both the good and the bad. He was idealistic, brash, brilliant, and wildly successful. He made moon money off of his invention, but then his life took a sharp turn. He squandered his fortune. Supposedly a hundred million dollars disappeared just like that. There were aerial accidents and deaths and escaped to Belize, and allegations of sex with miners and allegations of rape, accusations of murder, multiple arrests, multiple instances of fleeing the authorities, And just when it looked like McAfee was turning things around back in America, he makes an unlikely bid for president. He waged an unconventional and antagonistic campaign that in hindsight, doesn't look that different from Donald Trump's, and McAfee becomes a very early evangelist of cryptocurrencies. He amassed what would become a fortune in bitcoin before most people knew what it was. That's when the government went after him. He made one final run for his life, and it ended in his death. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, Jamie Tara Bay. I report on side were Security for Bloomberg News. I've been a foreign correspondent for over twenty years, and I spent about a decade as a conflict reporter. I've met and interviewed terrorists, war criminals, and dictators. Throughout my career. I've reported on men with God complexes, men who didn't believe they had to be accountable for their actions, men who may have gotten away with murder. In this season The Foundering, we will tell the story of John McAfee, how he walked the line between inventor and madman, how despite his early good fortune, his choices led him down the path towards a public and decades long self destruction. Over the course of this series, you'll hear the story of John McAfee's life and a reconstruction of his last moments based on interviews with colleagues, lovers, friends, and family members. Some of these people have never spoken publicly about him. The reporting spans the glory, tracing McAfee's legacy in Silicon Valley to his escape to Central America and his final days on the quiet streets of Cambriel's Spain, to the legacy of his death. Here's our reporter, Matthew Bremner, in Barcelona. So it's quite weird to think that whilst we were just in the morgue there and we had it confirmed that the bodies are actually all kind of kept in a basement, that McAfee was only a matter of meters away from us, below our feet, in some fridge, piled on top of other bodies. What we found will demystify some of the lines John McAfee told throughout his life, reveal the secrets he kept and resolved questions surrounding his demise. We'll be right back. One of the saw says I was talking to, asked, how do you tell the story of John McAfee. There are, frankly many stories, many lives, as it were, there was the Silicon Valley tycoon, the party animal, the spiritual guru, the international fugitive, the prophet of cyber security, and bitcoin, the alleged murderer and rapist, and in his last act, the death that launched countless new conspiracies. When mccafee tells his own life story, he always started the same way. He talks about his father, a violent alcoholic. Here he is on ABC in one of the things that was not idyllic, there was your father. He said that he was raging alcoholic, that he was abusive to you, like your mother. Nobody has an ideal life, even short dad. When you're they have shot himself. He shot himself. People aways looked at the best to explain the present doesn't work that way. McAfee's father was an American soldier based in southwest England. His mother, Joan Williams, was a bread She gave birth to John a little over two weeks after the official end of World War Two. The family moved to the US not long after. Here's Fran John's first wife. She asked us not to use her last name. Unfortunately, his father was a drinker and he turned He was the main drug, as they say. But John and his mom really had the brunt of the you know those ghosts in that guy's head. That was a living hell. France says, these early years of abuse haunted John and they kept company with him throughout his life. But absolutely he was abused emotionally. John had a tremendous, volatile temper, which is it comes from what happened to him during those years. Up until he's fifteen, McAfee spent most of his formative years in the town of Salem, Virginia. People close to the family told me he was sent to live with his aunt in England after his father died. He returned to the US in time to attend Roanoke College once he finished high school. He told ABC News that while he studied there, he also sold cocaine. Math came easy to me. I never studied. I just did what I felt like I should do in college mc if he says, he began peddling a product he knew he could sell, cocaine. But it's interesting that that drug dealing was really your first foray into entrepreneurship. Yeah, well it is. It's entrepreneurs it's it's everything, it's salesmanship. This is such a telling interview to me on a couple of levels. First of all, this attitude of superiority, almost articism, I don't need to study. It comes easily to me. Then there's the casual admission to drug dealing. Drugs will be a major factor in McAfee's life, cocaine in particular, and of course, his ability to spin an idea into a business was something he replicated repeatedly. After graduating from college, McAfee moved to Monroe, Louisiana, where he taught Matt as part of a graduate program he was doing at Northeast Louisiana State University. He met his first wife, Fran, when she was an eighteen year old student in his class, and he said that that very first day, right after that very first class, they got together. Fran remembers it slightly differently. I met him when I was eighteen, probably he was teaching MATT and I walked into my classroom, and he from the get go, he made it so obvious. I mean, it was like he latched on. He was I won't say it was like a vulture by any means, but he picked me out of the group to the point that it was really embarrassing for me because we had this whole classroom there. He made no bones about it that he was attracted to me. In fact, I went home that evening and I said, Mama, I've got to get out of this classroom because I'm not going to be able to learn maths. And of course she said, old frand You'll be just fine. But I knew his behavior sounded pretty aggressive, practically predatory. But he eventually wore her down and they started dating. Once their relationship became known, McAfee was fired by the university and he soon moved back to Virginia. That was after the university decided that John didn't need to be teaching school, but they allowed him to finish out his curriculum that semester because he was working towards his doctorate through their program. With his academic qualifications in hand, McAfee went on to work at a couple of high profile companies Serox, UNIVAC, Siemens, Booze Allen, and lockeed Martin. The one who seemed to have been most proud of was his time at NASA. He went to work at the god Art Institute for Space Studies, which is on the campus of Columbia University in New York City. He was there from night for about two years. In six McAfee described his work at NASA. In a knop ed for Business Insider, McAfee claimed that he encrypted the image is sent by the Tyrous Weather satellite when he worked at NASA in ninety I asked NASA several times about McAfee's time there. They said, yes, he briefly worked as a programmer, but several current and former NASA employees I spoke to could not confirm his assertions about what he did there, and he made other claims that he'd worked on the Apollo programs and that he came up with the solution to ten years of data coming in from space without any system to process it. Former NASA engineer Jim Cameron told me this was simply not plausible. He worked at the same Godard Institute of Space Studies years after McAfee left. He said McAfee's accounts was an insult to the people whose names are recorded in the volumes of NASA's history. As you'll hear, this is a bit of a pattern with John McAfee. He had a tendency to tell tall tales, to exaggerate, and even straight up fabricate. That's dint a xerox. He told one biographer he was based in London for the company, and was flown first class every weekend for six months back to New York to see his family. Not true, people close to the family said, those were just some of the many lines and exaggerations we've come across. He would later brag about all the journalists he'd played with, the tails he'd spun. Eventually, McAfee made his way to Palo Alto. He landed at a company called Omex in the early eighties. They were one of the first companies to build storage devices for data on glass discs that held several gigabytes. I spoke to Rebecca Costa, a colleague at his at Omex. She says her first meeting with John was memorable, and I remember looking out of my office window and seeing this guy drive up in a motorcycle with a black Michael Jackson looking leather jacket and show up at like eleven o'clock in the afternoon. Now, in those days we worked eight to five. There weren't flex hours, and he didn't even have a a knapsack or a backpack or anything. He just walked in and I thought somebody should call security. Who is the So McAfee comes walking up the stairs, and he came around the corner and I remember him saying, oh, you must be Rebecca cost I'm John McAfee. I'm the I had up a research and development and I was a little taken back, and I said, well, great, um, we were supposed to have a meeting at eight this morning. Again he said yeah, but I was hungover in Rebecca was one of a handful of women with senior executive roles in Silicon Valley. She headed product development. John headed research. His job was to design the software for the operating systems. So I said, would you mind if I came over to the lab and spent some time with you there to try to understand the technology better? And and he was very forthcoming. And it took me all of fifteen minutes in the R and D lab to realize he was brilliant. And I didn't I didn't care about the rest of it. I didn't care if he set up a bar in R and D and drank all day long. If if he could solve the kinds of technical problems he was solving, then he was my guy. By this point, John McAfee's character was set. He lived and worked according to his own rules, and he found himself in an environment where that was okay. He was going to show up when he was going to show up. I couldn't necessarily trust him to meet deadlines or stay within budget. But I did what old companies should do with brilliance, surround them with people that aren't as brilliant. You know. I was one of the people that was surrounding John to make John effective so that we could harness him. Those days that Omes were heady, just as they were throughout the rest of Silicon Valley. There was a sense of pioneership, that new ground was being broken in an industry that was still coming up with names for itself. People were creating things that had never existed before. They were and no rules here. There were no checks on people's behavior. Everybody was snorting coke, everybody was sleeping under their desks. And by the way, OMEX wasn't that unusual in Silicon Valley. You know, you would drive by these startups and the entire parking lot would still be full. We didn't go home. There were days where I had to go in and literally tell John to go home and take a shower. He smelled bad. Those were days of wild successes and spectacular failures. The mouse was invented. Around this time, Apple, Atari, and Hewlett Packard were all making their products right in the valley. The people at Omex were creating new technology alongside those other companies, but the products they were pushing out weren't selling. Rebecca says the writing was on the wall for Omex, and both she and John McAfee left the free wheeling company after a couple of years there and when John decided to create his own startup, McAfee and associates that mixture of work and play, the recklessness and the chaos would be part of the company's very foundation. That's next, Let's talk about technology in the eighties and early nineties. Back then, technology seemed so alien to people. In movies, computers were consistently portrayed as evil, like in the Matthew Broderick film War Games, where in Hello, shall we play a game? Hollywood played on people's distrust of the unfamiliar. Folks who did have computers were more often programmers, people who worked with them for a living, or yes, gamers. Here's Paul Ferguson, who's been in cyber security for over thirty years, so there's a lot of hackers who wanted to know how things work. And when you take things apart, you put them back together and you know how they work. You become an expert, which also five lover buildings, and then you can build a whole industry out of it. Paul says that it was a moment where possibilities felt endless. The basic building blocks of today's computer technology were being formed with little thought for the consequences. Collectively, as an industry, we didn't really think about how some of the stuff that we designed and built and put into place to enable all this wonderful connectivity could be used to steal thousands of dollars out of your bank account or take down the all the news sites in Estonia. In those exhilarating days of the early Internet, McAfee was living in Santa Clara. He was in his early forties, working at Lockheed Martin, and he was already onto a new wife, a woman named Judy. Here's Jim Lynch who lived next door to the car ball for about ten years. There were the kind of neighbors who had waved to each other over the fence and chat about their jobs. He had a phone line brought into his house a separate one from his regular phone line, and he put a computer there and hooked it up, and it was what they called them bulletin boards, so it's basically a chat room. Bullets and boards were like an early version of web forums or social media. People could connect their computers through phone lines and trade ideas. Jim says that McAfee was a programmer. He was a gamer. He was obsessed with puzzles. He'd upload computer programs onto those bullets and boards and delve into discussions with people who had logged on from around the world. McAfee could sense an opportunity surrounding the Internet. He became particularly fascinated with computer viruses. Jim says the first virus that caught McAfee's attention was one called the Pakistani Brain. We had coffee together in the front yard one sunny Sunday morning and he said something about, I've got an interesting new problem to solve, and there's this virus called the Pakistani Brain. He explained something to me about it, what it did and uh, and that he was fascinated with this. And then it was a few weeks later that he said this might be the business opportunity of a lifetime for me, and I might not be at Lockeed any longer. The Pakistani brain virus was a self replicating virus that automatically copied onto disks. It's read luck wildfire. Jim says it puzzled McAfee. He took it apart, studied it and figured out how it worked, and with the help of a programmer named Dennis Yell, who soon went to work for him, McAfee created his first anti virus software program. He describes it on ABC. I was figuring out, Oh, yeah, I can stop this yere, I thought this year, I can do that. I can actually removed the thing and wrote a program in a day and a half. So mcfe anti virus was created in a day and a half. And how old did it worked? Four million people were using it within a month. Four million people within a month, and McAfee went even further to drum up publicity. Here's James Spafford, a computer scientist at Purdue University who was active in the anti virus community, and apparently I've seen pictures. He had gotten a truck that he had dressed up as an anti virus response unit with lights and big signs on it. Uh, sort of like an amplified version of Ghostbusters doing with the ambulance, And when companies would report a virus, he'd drive this to their site to eliminate the virus. The business kind of took off from there. I guess this was late nineteen seven, early McAfee's business was really taking off. His house now had several phone lines leading into it. More people came into work. One person made the top of the washing machine her workspace so she could answer called. Another was working from the kitchen table. And Paul says the product was legitimately good. So it was a gold standard, I mean, and pretty much if there was a detection on McAfee's you pretty much could feel confident in the fact that it was not false positive. Right, So there was a general consensus that there. It wasn't just a piece of crap software scanner that it might tell you if you were in vector or not. It was actually quality in it. It had a good decent reputation. The business model was simple, and McAfee was pretty clever about it. He didn't put a price on the software he was sending out there. It was called shareware. Anyone could download the software on their personal computer for free, but when the business wanted the software, they needed a license to use it, and that's where the money was coming from. McAfee became the go to guy in the media to talk about viruses. They were slowly making their way into the public's mindset as the Internet became more and more of a thing. Here he is on PBS News Hour. I see infections of small companies where every computer has become infected and the company is near collapse from financial loss. Virus expert John McAfee, president of a newly formed computer virus association, helps companies recover from attacks. The problem is getting worse. We're seeing a new virus arrive on the scene at the rate of about one a month now. Most of the new viruses are worse than the old viruses because they are more subtle, more sophisticated, and they cause a great deal more damage. This is a simulation of an attack by a virus that infected four hundred computers in Mexico earlier this year. Its effects are obvious, but most viruses work surreptitiously, erasing data files and programs before they're detected. McAfee and others have developed new countermeasures called vaccines and anti viral programs that detect and neutralize viral infections. A few years later, the scariest virus yet came on the scene. It was called the Michelangelo virus, and what made it different was that it was said to infect a device but remain dormant until March six, the birthday of the famous Italian sculptor and painter. The virus would then override the data on that disc, destroy the disc, and make it impossible to get that data back. The alarm this caused sent purchases of antivirus software skyrocketing. Here's McAfee talking to Jim Lauer on PBS News. Our first to you, Mr McAfee, What is though, the potential for having from this thing. Well, we know that on the sixth of Mara, if you are infected with this virus, it will destroy all of the data in your hard disk. The question is how many systems are infecting. Estimates range anywhere from fifty thousand to five million, depending upon the number, and depending upon the number that is still infected by tomorrow. The habit could be substantial. But you don't have there's no way to know how many have been infected. What depends on who you believe and and who you listen to. But even the smallest estimate, so let's assume that only one in one thousand computers are infected. That's sixty thousand computers worldwide, and at an estimate of five hundreds of thousand dollars for each one to recover, we're still talking sixty million dollars at the very low end in terms of global costs. But in this case, Lara brought on a second computer expert, a guying named Charles Rothstein from the National Computer Security Association, and he had a different perspective on the michael Angelo virus threattin anything you want to add or subtract to that. As far as the impact of this, yes, I think rs months are actually significantly lower than that. Current estimates for virus infections by Michelangelo in the US are currently from our group around ten to twenty tho uh. And we also say that it probably won't be as expensive as as Mr McAfee says. Under certain circumstances, when they are infected, it may not cost a million dollars to clean up, So we think there will be fewer infections costing less. We called childs up for this podcast. Apparently he was only a college student when he was invited to appear on PBS News Hour, And unlike McAfee, he wasn't selling anti virus software. I was told I was I was being brought on simply to provide an objective view of someone who didn't have any financial interest. Um. You know, it's it's been said many times in many parts of life that if you want to find the truth, follow the money. And you know, we had no vested interest. There was no money trail for us in you know, inflating or deflating, you know, expectations. But for someone who was running an anti virus company at the time, as John was, there was certainly a financial interest in making this perhaps a bigger deal than it was. In the end, the virus impacted a number of devices, closer to Charles's more conservative prediction a few thousands, but the anti virus software industry exploded and McAfee software dominated the desktop computer market. My recollection was that it was truly ubiquitous. It was fair to say that they had the leading market share at that time. Um, and it became you know, more of a household name than most of the other anti virus suites at the time. They had deals YEP that preinstalled it on many computers. By this point, venture capitalists began calling the office looking to invest and proposing to take the company public. Jim Lynch remembers taking at least one of those call, and so I went into John, I said, can you take a call? Somebody's asking about the business, And so I handed in that call and that led to him talking to the vcs them investing in the company with a plan to take the company public. Jim Lynch says they didn't need to go public the company was making so much money, but McAfee saw this as his opportunity to achieve another level of success in his career. The investors brought in new management to prepare McAfee and associates first I p O. One of the new employees, Andrea Nation, said she found herself covering for John when his wife, Judy would come to her with questions. Judy was kind of like a thorn in my side, always asking questions, questioning credit card bills, you know, company American Express bills and everything. And I don't throw anybody under the bus I don't, you know, like when it comes to stuff like that. We've reached out to Judy for comment. She has not responded to us as of this recording. The stuff like that, Andrea mentions had to do with a series of competitions that took place within the office. They kept a running tally of who had sex with witch colleague and where, and there was a name for the group of people involved with the Yeah, so they had the Little Foxes group. And you know, you would get points around the office for having sex and all this other stuff, and you know I would, I would clean Bill's desk off. And the first time he saw me doing it, he's like, you don't have to do that. What do you like? You know that's above and beyond. I'm like, oh, yes I do. I'm like, this is the most points in the office. And I told him and he's like, why did we have to get rid of the would getting rid of these crazy people? Bill is Bill Larson, the man tasked by investors to take over the company's leadership. Andrea is saying that she was wiping down his desk because other employees had had sex on it the night before. Because in their workplace, games sex on the new Bosses desk scored the most points. Andrea says McAfee's office was truly bizarre. There was three employees and they would tell us that they were witches, and they would sit at the conference table and they do their wiccan ceremonies. We had other people that used to come to work in like renaissance clothing. Um one Halloween, a guy like actually just wore a cop piece, you know. But they were so used to just being able to do whatever they wanted to do. And when when the suit and tie guy came in with Bill, you know, that was really hard for these people. You know. Bill Lawson was the chief student taie guy. He was brought in by venture capitalists to make McAfee and Associates run more like a company that could go public and meet SEC requirements. So Bill became the new CEO. McAfee was named chief technical officer of his own company, and the two never saw eye to eye. John was a amazing technical genius, but he wasn't a leader. He couldn't take the company to the next level. On what Bill Larson did was amazing. Bill Lawson was ready for McAfee to leave and McAfee was ready to cash out. She says, I think it was John's mindset, you know, number one, like, you know funck this. You know, these guys are taking this away. But you know, I think he knew in the back of his mind that he shouldn't be there. Bill always told me from day one, He's like, we're gonna get a big building and everybody's going to see the name of the company, but it's not gonna be McAfee, you know. Bill Lawson eventually got rid of the entire original crew of McAfee and associates. McAfee stepped down as an employee in nine and as a board member in From our internal calculations, his cash disbursements and stock sales earned him about eighty four million dollars. I spoke to a number of cybersecurity experts who said that McAfee anti virus software shaped computer security for decades onward. Because McAfee introduced his product at just the right time, right when many of today's technologies were being developed. He sparked an entire industry built around convincing people to buy new things that would keep their systems secure. That was his genius. Here's Allan Lisca, who's an authority in cybersecurity. He's worked in the industry for nearly thirty years, both as an ethical hacker and a threat intelligence analyst. All of this and it kind of all started with John McAfee, where he convinced people, oh, no, you shouldn't make a more secure operating system. Instead, you should just buy my software and put that on the operating systems. Alan Liska says that as more and more people went online, they were told antivirus software was a must, and when that wasn't enough, they were told they had to buy more security features, firewalls and proxies and gateways, male security programs. McAfee set us on the road where instead of building safer operating systems, we buy add ons, and that hard sell continues today. So rather than pitching people to improve Microsoft security, go buy my thing instead, and then you know, my company makes lots of money. So that's kind of the genius of John McAfee, not the programming, but his ability to sell this thing that really people should need. What people should be doing is saying, please make more secure software. So what he's saying is there was a moment when software developers could have resolved to create more secure networks, but instead they relied on anti virus software for protection. So it begs the question did McAfee actually create a less secure world? In some ways, this was the beginning of the cybersecurity industry, a world we know today that is dominated by firms that are called in when companies like Colonial Pipeline get hacked and the gas stops pumping. These are the people hired to fight viruses and hackers, to deal with a tax that encrypt data and demand ransoms. And John McAfee was kind of like the midwife and he made bank out of it. Here's Charles Rudstein. It was an extraordinary amount of money in any era. Today it means you never have to work again and you can do whatever you want with the rest of your life. And back then it was worth some multiple of that. So in short strokes, you know the guy hadn't made. He had it made. But in just over a decade McAfee will say that he squandered almost all his money. In less than three decades, he would be hanging in a jail cell. How did he wind up losing it all? That's next time on foundering the John McAfee. Story Foundering is hosted by me Jamie Tara Bay. Sean Wyn is our executive producer. Matthew Bremner can bitted reporting to this episode special thanks to Eilena Pang. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sharif Yusef is our audio engineer, Mark Million and Vander May, Andy Martin and Molly Shoots are our story editors. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.

It's torture. It torture is my mind, you know, I don't know. It's just hard to move forward. It's hard to think about anything else because I just won't have him and take him and lay him to rest as he asked. That's Janice Dyson McAfee. She was the last woman married to John McAfee, the anti virus software pioneer, before he died. When we spoke to her, his body was still laying in the morgue in Spain. Even a year later, she still clearly remembered the moment she found out about his death. And then I saw the news. Um, yeah, I just kind of broke down, you know, and I was, you know, kind of inconsolable for a while and just um, really in disbelief. John McAfee has been found dead in a Spanish prison cell, shortly after it was announced he would be extradited to the US to face charges of financial crimes. The founder of the anti virus saw where that bears his name, had just been ordered extradite into the United States on tax evasion charges. He was seventy five and a wild ride of a life. It was that was June one, inside the cell of a prison just outside Barcelona. Medics tried and failed to resuscitate him. McAfee was arrested in Barcelona as he was about to board a flight to Istanbul in October. In a tweet posted June tenth, McAfee told his one million Twitter followers quote there is much sorrow in prison disguised as hostility. Janna said that McAfee was allowed to make three eight minute phone calls a day from prison, so she talked to him all the time, and she was stunned by the news. I was trying to make arrangements to um go and see his body, and and and get his things from the prison, and just understand how it was that, you know, the world had found out before I did, her, before his attorney did. She was also living in Spain. She made her way over to the prison in front of a group of reporters. She said, he would never have done this, but he's a fighter. He's always a fighter, and anybody that knows John, that knows him even a little bit, knows that about him. He would never quit this way. He would never take his life in this way. She didn't believe that her partner would kill himself and that feeling only became stronger when she went to view the body. So I came into the room and there was um, you know, glass window in between and he was there and on the bourney, and so I couldn't see anything. He was completely completely covered. Um they had a sheet and a blanket wrapped over him, over top of him. Genesis suspicions seemed to add fuel to the conspiracy theories that were already beginning to take off. He would want his death to be a subject of great speculation. He was a He was a wild character. He had a tattoo that said whacked to remind people that if he was found to commit suicide, that he didn't do it. Oh, man, I wonder in this if the joke is actually on us. The comparisons to Jeffrey Epstein came quickly. McAfee claimed that, like Epstein, he too was the target of powerful people who wanted him silenced. Maybe those comparisons were inevitable. Both men died in jail awaiting trial, and McAfee stoked those conspiracy theories himself. In October, he tweeted from prison, I'm contenting here. I have friends, The food is good all as well know that if I hang myself allah Epstein, it will be no fault of mine. McAfee's death raised a host of other questions. He was staying in a hotel owned by Russians that had previously been rated by the police. Who was he working with there? Why was he even in Spain? Anyway? We went to Barcelona and Cambriel's looking for answers. We thought talking to one of the people closest to McPhee would help, but Jana's only deep in the mystery. Here's contributing reporter Matthew Bremner. What kind of things were you doing? Um, you know, how long are you there for? Roughly? In general terms? No, I just I just don't want to go into details about, you know, the I really don't want to get into dates and time period. The hotel where you were reportedly staying was also a crypto mine that was owned by Russians. Can you confirm and deny that? Okay? I can either confirm nor deny that, okay. But what we're I mean it's I mean, obviously on John's Twitter there are videos with him appearing with Russians, So I mean something that's in the public sphere, something in the public record. I'm not trying to I'm not gonna catch out here, I understand, but but I I enjoy breathing. Um. I don't want that to to stop happening. Yeah. No matter what you believe, whether you think his death was an international conspiracy or a desperate suicide, John McAfee's death in a Spanish jail was a pitiful end to the life of a one time cybersecurity pioneer, someone whose name was synonymous with network security, someone who was considered a technical genius before McAfee was an alleged criminal. He was an entrepreneur who helped build an industry that's now a pillar of Silicon Valley. It's a story that's been mostly forgotten in the deluge of salacious news that followed. But McAfee started from nothing and essentially kickstarted the modern cybersecurity business. It's hard to overstate how ubiquitous McAfee Anti virus soft where was for decades. Just about every time you logged onto a computer, first you see the Windows logo, then you see McAfee anti virus software scanning, always running in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. McAfee built a piece of software that dominated the technology industry in the eighties and nineties. Like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, he was a leading tech founder of his day. Unlike so many of his peers, McAfee had a public personality and a profile, appearing frequently on television introducing audiences to the concept of a computer virus. John McAfee was a walking embodiment of the early Internet industry, both the good and the bad. He was idealistic, brash, brilliant, and wildly successful. He made moon money off of his invention, but then his life took a sharp turn. He squandered his fortune. Supposedly a hundred million dollars disappeared just like that. There were aerial accidents and deaths and escaped to Belize, and allegations of sex with miners and allegations of rape, accusations of murder, multiple arrests, multiple instances of fleeing the authorities, And just when it looked like McAfee was turning things around back in America, he makes an unlikely bid for president. He waged an unconventional and antagonistic campaign that in hindsight, doesn't look that different from Donald Trump's, and McAfee becomes a very early evangelist of cryptocurrencies. He amassed what would become a fortune in bitcoin before most people knew what it was. That's when the government went after him. He made one final run for his life, and it ended in his death. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, Jamie Tara Bay. I report on side were Security for Bloomberg News. I've been a foreign correspondent for over twenty years, and I spent about a decade as a conflict reporter. I've met and interviewed terrorists, war criminals, and dictators. Throughout my career. I've reported on men with God complexes, men who didn't believe they had to be accountable for their actions, men who may have gotten away with murder. In this season The Foundering, we will tell the story of John McAfee, how he walked the line between inventor and madman, how despite his early good fortune, his choices led him down the path towards a public and decades long self destruction. Over the course of this series, you'll hear the story of John McAfee's life and a reconstruction of his last moments based on interviews with colleagues, lovers, friends, and family members. Some of these people have never spoken publicly about him. The reporting spans the glory, tracing McAfee's legacy in Silicon Valley to his escape to Central America and his final days on the quiet streets of Cambriel's Spain, to the legacy of his death. Here's our reporter, Matthew Bremner, in Barcelona. So it's quite weird to think that whilst we were just in the morgue there and we had it confirmed that the bodies are actually all kind of kept in a basement, that McAfee was only a matter of meters away from us, below our feet, in some fridge, piled on top of other bodies. What we found will demystify some of the lines John McAfee told throughout his life, reveal the secrets he kept and resolved questions surrounding his demise. We'll be right back. One of the saw says I was talking to, asked, how do you tell the story of John McAfee. There are, frankly many stories, many lives, as it were, there was the Silicon Valley tycoon, the party animal, the spiritual guru, the international fugitive, the prophet of cyber security, and bitcoin, the alleged murderer and rapist, and in his last act, the death that launched countless new conspiracies. When mccafee tells his own life story, he always started the same way. He talks about his father, a violent alcoholic. Here he is on ABC in one of the things that was not idyllic, there was your father. He said that he was raging alcoholic, that he was abusive to you, like your mother. Nobody has an ideal life, even short dad. When you're they have shot himself. He shot himself. People aways looked at the best to explain the present doesn't work that way. McAfee's father was an American soldier based in southwest England. His mother, Joan Williams, was a bread She gave birth to John a little over two weeks after the official end of World War Two. The family moved to the US not long after. Here's Fran John's first wife. She asked us not to use her last name. Unfortunately, his father was a drinker and he turned He was the main drug, as they say. But John and his mom really had the brunt of the you know those ghosts in that guy's head. That was a living hell. France says, these early years of abuse haunted John and they kept company with him throughout his life. But absolutely he was abused emotionally. John had a tremendous, volatile temper, which is it comes from what happened to him during those years. Up until he's fifteen, McAfee spent most of his formative years in the town of Salem, Virginia. People close to the family told me he was sent to live with his aunt in England after his father died. He returned to the US in time to attend Roanoke College once he finished high school. He told ABC News that while he studied there, he also sold cocaine. Math came easy to me. I never studied. I just did what I felt like I should do in college mc if he says, he began peddling a product he knew he could sell, cocaine. But it's interesting that that drug dealing was really your first foray into entrepreneurship. Yeah, well it is. It's entrepreneurs it's it's everything, it's salesmanship. This is such a telling interview to me on a couple of levels. First of all, this attitude of superiority, almost articism, I don't need to study. It comes easily to me. Then there's the casual admission to drug dealing. Drugs will be a major factor in McAfee's life, cocaine in particular, and of course, his ability to spin an idea into a business was something he replicated repeatedly. After graduating from college, McAfee moved to Monroe, Louisiana, where he taught Matt as part of a graduate program he was doing at Northeast Louisiana State University. He met his first wife, Fran, when she was an eighteen year old student in his class, and he said that that very first day, right after that very first class, they got together. Fran remembers it slightly differently. I met him when I was eighteen, probably he was teaching MATT and I walked into my classroom, and he from the get go, he made it so obvious. I mean, it was like he latched on. He was I won't say it was like a vulture by any means, but he picked me out of the group to the point that it was really embarrassing for me because we had this whole classroom there. He made no bones about it that he was attracted to me. In fact, I went home that evening and I said, Mama, I've got to get out of this classroom because I'm not going to be able to learn maths. And of course she said, old frand You'll be just fine. But I knew his behavior sounded pretty aggressive, practically predatory. But he eventually wore her down and they started dating. Once their relationship became known, McAfee was fired by the university and he soon moved back to Virginia. That was after the university decided that John didn't need to be teaching school, but they allowed him to finish out his curriculum that semester because he was working towards his doctorate through their program. With his academic qualifications in hand, McAfee went on to work at a couple of high profile companies Serox, UNIVAC, Siemens, Booze Allen, and lockeed Martin. The one who seemed to have been most proud of was his time at NASA. He went to work at the god Art Institute for Space Studies, which is on the campus of Columbia University in New York City. He was there from night for about two years. In six McAfee described his work at NASA. In a knop ed for Business Insider, McAfee claimed that he encrypted the image is sent by the Tyrous Weather satellite when he worked at NASA in ninety I asked NASA several times about McAfee's time there. They said, yes, he briefly worked as a programmer, but several current and former NASA employees I spoke to could not confirm his assertions about what he did there, and he made other claims that he'd worked on the Apollo programs and that he came up with the solution to ten years of data coming in from space without any system to process it. Former NASA engineer Jim Cameron told me this was simply not plausible. He worked at the same Godard Institute of Space Studies years after McAfee left. He said McAfee's accounts was an insult to the people whose names are recorded in the volumes of NASA's history. As you'll hear, this is a bit of a pattern with John McAfee. He had a tendency to tell tall tales, to exaggerate, and even straight up fabricate. That's dint a xerox. He told one biographer he was based in London for the company, and was flown first class every weekend for six months back to New York to see his family. Not true, people close to the family said, those were just some of the many lines and exaggerations we've come across. He would later brag about all the journalists he'd played with, the tails he'd spun. Eventually, McAfee made his way to Palo Alto. He landed at a company called Omex in the early eighties. They were one of the first companies to build storage devices for data on glass discs that held several gigabytes. I spoke to Rebecca Costa, a colleague at his at Omex. She says her first meeting with John was memorable, and I remember looking out of my office window and seeing this guy drive up in a motorcycle with a black Michael Jackson looking leather jacket and show up at like eleven o'clock in the afternoon. Now, in those days we worked eight to five. There weren't flex hours, and he didn't even have a a knapsack or a backpack or anything. He just walked in and I thought somebody should call security. Who is the So McAfee comes walking up the stairs, and he came around the corner and I remember him saying, oh, you must be Rebecca cost I'm John McAfee. I'm the I had up a research and development and I was a little taken back, and I said, well, great, um, we were supposed to have a meeting at eight this morning. Again he said yeah, but I was hungover in Rebecca was one of a handful of women with senior executive roles in Silicon Valley. She headed product development. John headed research. His job was to design the software for the operating systems. So I said, would you mind if I came over to the lab and spent some time with you there to try to understand the technology better? And and he was very forthcoming. And it took me all of fifteen minutes in the R and D lab to realize he was brilliant. And I didn't I didn't care about the rest of it. I didn't care if he set up a bar in R and D and drank all day long. If if he could solve the kinds of technical problems he was solving, then he was my guy. By this point, John McAfee's character was set. He lived and worked according to his own rules, and he found himself in an environment where that was okay. He was going to show up when he was going to show up. I couldn't necessarily trust him to meet deadlines or stay within budget. But I did what old companies should do with brilliance, surround them with people that aren't as brilliant. You know. I was one of the people that was surrounding John to make John effective so that we could harness him. Those days that Omes were heady, just as they were throughout the rest of Silicon Valley. There was a sense of pioneership, that new ground was being broken in an industry that was still coming up with names for itself. People were creating things that had never existed before. They were and no rules here. There were no checks on people's behavior. Everybody was snorting coke, everybody was sleeping under their desks. And by the way, OMEX wasn't that unusual in Silicon Valley. You know, you would drive by these startups and the entire parking lot would still be full. We didn't go home. There were days where I had to go in and literally tell John to go home and take a shower. He smelled bad. Those were days of wild successes and spectacular failures. The mouse was invented. Around this time, Apple, Atari, and Hewlett Packard were all making their products right in the valley. The people at Omex were creating new technology alongside those other companies, but the products they were pushing out weren't selling. Rebecca says the writing was on the wall for Omex, and both she and John McAfee left the free wheeling company after a couple of years there and when John decided to create his own startup, McAfee and associates that mixture of work and play, the recklessness and the chaos would be part of the company's very foundation. That's next, Let's talk about technology in the eighties and early nineties. Back then, technology seemed so alien to people. In movies, computers were consistently portrayed as evil, like in the Matthew Broderick film War Games, where in Hello, shall we play a game? Hollywood played on people's distrust of the unfamiliar. Folks who did have computers were more often programmers, people who worked with them for a living, or yes, gamers. Here's Paul Ferguson, who's been in cyber security for over thirty years, so there's a lot of hackers who wanted to know how things work. And when you take things apart, you put them back together and you know how they work. You become an expert, which also five lover buildings, and then you can build a whole industry out of it. Paul says that it was a moment where possibilities felt endless. The basic building blocks of today's computer technology were being formed with little thought for the consequences. Collectively, as an industry, we didn't really think about how some of the stuff that we designed and built and put into place to enable all this wonderful connectivity could be used to steal thousands of dollars out of your bank account or take down the all the news sites in Estonia. In those exhilarating days of the early Internet, McAfee was living in Santa Clara. He was in his early forties, working at Lockheed Martin, and he was already onto a new wife, a woman named Judy. Here's Jim Lynch who lived next door to the car ball for about ten years. There were the kind of neighbors who had waved to each other over the fence and chat about their jobs. He had a phone line brought into his house a separate one from his regular phone line, and he put a computer there and hooked it up, and it was what they called them bulletin boards, so it's basically a chat room. Bullets and boards were like an early version of web forums or social media. People could connect their computers through phone lines and trade ideas. Jim says that McAfee was a programmer. He was a gamer. He was obsessed with puzzles. He'd upload computer programs onto those bullets and boards and delve into discussions with people who had logged on from around the world. McAfee could sense an opportunity surrounding the Internet. He became particularly fascinated with computer viruses. Jim says the first virus that caught McAfee's attention was one called the Pakistani Brain. We had coffee together in the front yard one sunny Sunday morning and he said something about, I've got an interesting new problem to solve, and there's this virus called the Pakistani Brain. He explained something to me about it, what it did and uh, and that he was fascinated with this. And then it was a few weeks later that he said this might be the business opportunity of a lifetime for me, and I might not be at Lockeed any longer. The Pakistani brain virus was a self replicating virus that automatically copied onto disks. It's read luck wildfire. Jim says it puzzled McAfee. He took it apart, studied it and figured out how it worked, and with the help of a programmer named Dennis Yell, who soon went to work for him, McAfee created his first anti virus software program. He describes it on ABC. I was figuring out, Oh, yeah, I can stop this yere, I thought this year, I can do that. I can actually removed the thing and wrote a program in a day and a half. So mcfe anti virus was created in a day and a half. And how old did it worked? Four million people were using it within a month. Four million people within a month, and McAfee went even further to drum up publicity. Here's James Spafford, a computer scientist at Purdue University who was active in the anti virus community, and apparently I've seen pictures. He had gotten a truck that he had dressed up as an anti virus response unit with lights and big signs on it. Uh, sort of like an amplified version of Ghostbusters doing with the ambulance, And when companies would report a virus, he'd drive this to their site to eliminate the virus. The business kind of took off from there. I guess this was late nineteen seven, early McAfee's business was really taking off. His house now had several phone lines leading into it. More people came into work. One person made the top of the washing machine her workspace so she could answer called. Another was working from the kitchen table. And Paul says the product was legitimately good. So it was a gold standard, I mean, and pretty much if there was a detection on McAfee's you pretty much could feel confident in the fact that it was not false positive. Right, So there was a general consensus that there. It wasn't just a piece of crap software scanner that it might tell you if you were in vector or not. It was actually quality in it. It had a good decent reputation. The business model was simple, and McAfee was pretty clever about it. He didn't put a price on the software he was sending out there. It was called shareware. Anyone could download the software on their personal computer for free, but when the business wanted the software, they needed a license to use it, and that's where the money was coming from. McAfee became the go to guy in the media to talk about viruses. They were slowly making their way into the public's mindset as the Internet became more and more of a thing. Here he is on PBS News Hour. I see infections of small companies where every computer has become infected and the company is near collapse from financial loss. Virus expert John McAfee, president of a newly formed computer virus association, helps companies recover from attacks. The problem is getting worse. We're seeing a new virus arrive on the scene at the rate of about one a month now. Most of the new viruses are worse than the old viruses because they are more subtle, more sophisticated, and they cause a great deal more damage. This is a simulation of an attack by a virus that infected four hundred computers in Mexico earlier this year. Its effects are obvious, but most viruses work surreptitiously, erasing data files and programs before they're detected. McAfee and others have developed new countermeasures called vaccines and anti viral programs that detect and neutralize viral infections. A few years later, the scariest virus yet came on the scene. It was called the Michelangelo virus, and what made it different was that it was said to infect a device but remain dormant until March six, the birthday of the famous Italian sculptor and painter. The virus would then override the data on that disc, destroy the disc, and make it impossible to get that data back. The alarm this caused sent purchases of antivirus software skyrocketing. Here's McAfee talking to Jim Lauer on PBS News. Our first to you, Mr McAfee, What is though, the potential for having from this thing. Well, we know that on the sixth of Mara, if you are infected with this virus, it will destroy all of the data in your hard disk. The question is how many systems are infecting. Estimates range anywhere from fifty thousand to five million, depending upon the number, and depending upon the number that is still infected by tomorrow. The habit could be substantial. But you don't have there's no way to know how many have been infected. What depends on who you believe and and who you listen to. But even the smallest estimate, so let's assume that only one in one thousand computers are infected. That's sixty thousand computers worldwide, and at an estimate of five hundreds of thousand dollars for each one to recover, we're still talking sixty million dollars at the very low end in terms of global costs. But in this case, Lara brought on a second computer expert, a guying named Charles Rothstein from the National Computer Security Association, and he had a different perspective on the michael Angelo virus threattin anything you want to add or subtract to that. As far as the impact of this, yes, I think rs months are actually significantly lower than that. Current estimates for virus infections by Michelangelo in the US are currently from our group around ten to twenty tho uh. And we also say that it probably won't be as expensive as as Mr McAfee says. Under certain circumstances, when they are infected, it may not cost a million dollars to clean up, So we think there will be fewer infections costing less. We called childs up for this podcast. Apparently he was only a college student when he was invited to appear on PBS News Hour, And unlike McAfee, he wasn't selling anti virus software. I was told I was I was being brought on simply to provide an objective view of someone who didn't have any financial interest. Um. You know, it's it's been said many times in many parts of life that if you want to find the truth, follow the money. And you know, we had no vested interest. There was no money trail for us in you know, inflating or deflating, you know, expectations. But for someone who was running an anti virus company at the time, as John was, there was certainly a financial interest in making this perhaps a bigger deal than it was. In the end, the virus impacted a number of devices, closer to Charles's more conservative prediction a few thousands, but the anti virus software industry exploded and McAfee software dominated the desktop computer market. My recollection was that it was truly ubiquitous. It was fair to say that they had the leading market share at that time. Um, and it became you know, more of a household name than most of the other anti virus suites at the time. They had deals YEP that preinstalled it on many computers. By this point, venture capitalists began calling the office looking to invest and proposing to take the company public. Jim Lynch remembers taking at least one of those call, and so I went into John, I said, can you take a call? Somebody's asking about the business, And so I handed in that call and that led to him talking to the vcs them investing in the company with a plan to take the company public. Jim Lynch says they didn't need to go public the company was making so much money, but McAfee saw this as his opportunity to achieve another level of success in his career. The investors brought in new management to prepare McAfee and associates first I p O. One of the new employees, Andrea Nation, said she found herself covering for John when his wife, Judy would come to her with questions. Judy was kind of like a thorn in my side, always asking questions, questioning credit card bills, you know, company American Express bills and everything. And I don't throw anybody under the bus I don't, you know, like when it comes to stuff like that. We've reached out to Judy for comment. She has not responded to us as of this recording. The stuff like that, Andrea mentions had to do with a series of competitions that took place within the office. They kept a running tally of who had sex with witch colleague and where, and there was a name for the group of people involved with the Yeah, so they had the Little Foxes group. And you know, you would get points around the office for having sex and all this other stuff, and you know I would, I would clean Bill's desk off. And the first time he saw me doing it, he's like, you don't have to do that. What do you like? You know that's above and beyond. I'm like, oh, yes I do. I'm like, this is the most points in the office. And I told him and he's like, why did we have to get rid of the would getting rid of these crazy people? Bill is Bill Larson, the man tasked by investors to take over the company's leadership. Andrea is saying that she was wiping down his desk because other employees had had sex on it the night before. Because in their workplace, games sex on the new Bosses desk scored the most points. Andrea says McAfee's office was truly bizarre. There was three employees and they would tell us that they were witches, and they would sit at the conference table and they do their wiccan ceremonies. We had other people that used to come to work in like renaissance clothing. Um one Halloween, a guy like actually just wore a cop piece, you know. But they were so used to just being able to do whatever they wanted to do. And when when the suit and tie guy came in with Bill, you know, that was really hard for these people. You know. Bill Lawson was the chief student taie guy. He was brought in by venture capitalists to make McAfee and Associates run more like a company that could go public and meet SEC requirements. So Bill became the new CEO. McAfee was named chief technical officer of his own company, and the two never saw eye to eye. John was a amazing technical genius, but he wasn't a leader. He couldn't take the company to the next level. On what Bill Larson did was amazing. Bill Lawson was ready for McAfee to leave and McAfee was ready to cash out. She says, I think it was John's mindset, you know, number one, like, you know funck this. You know, these guys are taking this away. But you know, I think he knew in the back of his mind that he shouldn't be there. Bill always told me from day one, He's like, we're gonna get a big building and everybody's going to see the name of the company, but it's not gonna be McAfee, you know. Bill Lawson eventually got rid of the entire original crew of McAfee and associates. McAfee stepped down as an employee in nine and as a board member in From our internal calculations, his cash disbursements and stock sales earned him about eighty four million dollars. I spoke to a number of cybersecurity experts who said that McAfee anti virus software shaped computer security for decades onward. Because McAfee introduced his product at just the right time, right when many of today's technologies were being developed. He sparked an entire industry built around convincing people to buy new things that would keep their systems secure. That was his genius. Here's Allan Lisca, who's an authority in cybersecurity. He's worked in the industry for nearly thirty years, both as an ethical hacker and a threat intelligence analyst. All of this and it kind of all started with John McAfee, where he convinced people, oh, no, you shouldn't make a more secure operating system. Instead, you should just buy my software and put that on the operating systems. Alan Liska says that as more and more people went online, they were told antivirus software was a must, and when that wasn't enough, they were told they had to buy more security features, firewalls and proxies and gateways, male security programs. McAfee set us on the road where instead of building safer operating systems, we buy add ons, and that hard sell continues today. So rather than pitching people to improve Microsoft security, go buy my thing instead, and then you know, my company makes lots of money. So that's kind of the genius of John McAfee, not the programming, but his ability to sell this thing that really people should need. What people should be doing is saying, please make more secure software. So what he's saying is there was a moment when software developers could have resolved to create more secure networks, but instead they relied on anti virus software for protection. So it begs the question did McAfee actually create a less secure world? In some ways, this was the beginning of the cybersecurity industry, a world we know today that is dominated by firms that are called in when companies like Colonial Pipeline get hacked and the gas stops pumping. These are the people hired to fight viruses and hackers, to deal with a tax that encrypt data and demand ransoms. And John McAfee was kind of like the midwife and he made bank out of it. Here's Charles Rudstein. It was an extraordinary amount of money in any era. Today it means you never have to work again and you can do whatever you want with the rest of your life. And back then it was worth some multiple of that. So in short strokes, you know the guy hadn't made. He had it made. But in just over a decade McAfee will say that he squandered almost all his money. In less than three decades, he would be hanging in a jail cell. How did he wind up losing it all? That's next time on foundering the John McAfee. Story Foundering is hosted by me Jamie Tara Bay. Sean Wyn is our executive producer. Matthew Bremner can bitted reporting to this episode special thanks to Eilena Pang. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sharif Yusef is our audio engineer, Mark Million and Vander May, Andy Martin and Molly Shoots are our story editors. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.