What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial, if you're watching this video on a computer, there's a pretty good chance that you're, a customer of mcafee antivirus, which is used on over half a billion personal computers around the world? This past november, mcafee was acquired by a consortium of investors for 14 billion dollars. Getting a multi-billion dollar buyout offer is perhaps the best outcome for a tech founder they'd be set for life and never have to work another day, john mcafee founded mcafee antivirus. All the way back in 1987., he is widely considered to be a computer science genius and pioneer within the cyber security industry in the summer of 2021. He was in spain, but he wasn't on the beach celebrating the impending multi-billion dollar payday.

He was instead in a barcelona prison cell, facing the prospect of 35 years in prison for tax evasion. Charges in june of 2021, the software visionary was pronounced dead in what authorities called an apparent suicide at its peak. Mcafee was worth 100 million dollars and was one of the most revered visionaries in the tech industry. He was even a presidential candidate, finishing second place in the 2016 libertarian party primary election, but over the years his life got increasingly complicated and bizarre.

The end result was him becoming an international fugitive and eventually meeting his untimely demise in a spanish jail cell in this video we'll look at how john mcafee made 100 million dollars and how he lost his life. But first give me 30 seconds to tell you about the new wall street millennial newsletter that we just launched this daily newsletter covers all the biggest market. Moving events that you need to know to get your day started. All the news, insights and analysis gets sent each morning straight to your email inbox.

The best part is it's completely free to sign up, just go to wallstreetmillennial.com newsletter and input. Your email link in the description below john had a tough childhood growing up with an abusive and alcoholic father in virginia. Despite his rough household environment, he excelled in school. He attended a small liberal arts college in virginia studying mathematics when he graduated in the late 1960s.

Computers were just starting to enter the mainstream and mcafee was a brilliant computer programmer in 1968. He got a job as a computer programmer at nasa where he worked on the apollo space program throughout the 1970s and 80s. He worked at various companies in software engineering and similar roles. In 1986, the computer science world was shocked when the so-called brain virus was unleashed onto the world.

It affected ibm personal computers, replacing some of the memory disk with a cryptic message at the time. Mcafee realized that computers were completely vulnerable to these types of viruses, with pretty much zero defense mechanisms as the economy and society in general became more and more reliant on computers. This was a huge risk, so he started working on an anti-virus software which he named virus scan it identified and stopped. Computer viruses viruscan was the first commercially available antivirus software and was a huge success.

Within a few years. It was generating millions of dollars in sales and in 1992 he took the company public with an ipo. John mcafee wasn't interested in becoming the ceo of a public company, and just two years later he stepped down and sold all of his shares. Since then, he had no involvement with his namesake company.

In hindsight he should have held on to those shares. 16 years later, in 2010, intel acquired mcafee associates for 7.7 billion dollars, which would have given him a payday worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, but mcafee wasn't done in the software world. He leveraged his technological expertise to get involved with other companies. He founded tribal voice, which made the internet powered instant messaging service powwow.

He also co-founded a computer firewall company called zone labs, which was eventually acquired for 200 million dollars, giving mcafee another huge payday. He never got overly attached to any of the companies they found it. He would help build the business and once he got bored, he would cash out either by selling his shares or by being acquired by another company by the mid-2010s he'd accumulated a fortune of 100 million dollars from the sale of his namesake antivirus and other companies. He used his wealth to buy and build five luxury mansions around the us from new mexico to hawaii.

While mcafee was a visionary computer scientist, he had no particular expertise in real estate with many of his investments ending in disaster. For example, he spent 37 million dollars to build a mega mansion in 1993. Around the same time he stepped down from mcafee associates in 2005. He sold it for just five million dollars for an 86 loss.

By the time the 2009 financial crisis came around. He had the vast majority of his net worth invested in real estate and he likely used mortgages to fund most of his investments. As real estate prices free fell. He was forced to liquidate his properties at the lows going into the crisis.

He had a net worth of 100 million dollars by the end of 2009. This has decreased to just 4 million dollars for a 96 drop. He was always somewhat eccentric, but this was nothing terribly unusual about silicon valley entrepreneurs, but after he lost everything in 2008. His ventures started getting more and more unusual.

He took the few million dollars that he had left and traveled to belize. Belize is a beautiful country with world-renowned jungles and marine wildlife. It is a small country with a population of just four hundred thousand is not a major hub for software development. It looks like he got bored of writing computer code and wanted to try his hand at a new business venture, so he founded a company called quorum x.

The stated mission of the company was to harness the local historical knowledge and plants of belize to create paradigm. Shifting medicines, the idea of the medicine is to target the quorum sensing properties of bacteria. When many bacteria come together in close proximity, they eject chemicals to communicate with each other and reproduce or otherwise become dangerous. Mcafee thought that he could use the plants native to belize to block the quorum sensing abilities in bacteria and use this as antibacterial treatment.

Anti-Quorum sensing has not been applied to medical treatments in any significant extent, but mcafee thought that he could make a revolutionary breakthrough in this field just like he did in the cyber security industry 25 years prior. So he set up a research lab in the belizean jungle to grow herbs and make his treatment. Belize is a politically volatile country with a lot of gang violence to make sure that this wouldn't get in the way of his new company. He hired a few former felons to be his personal bodyguards.

He also established a harem of women to accompany him when he wasn't on his compound. He was living in a high-class beachfront community, mostly inhabited by foreign expats. By most accounts. He was a hard partier extensively.

Utilizing recreational substances belize authorities found it suspicious for a man building a lab in the middle of a jungle guarded by armed security personnel. They raided his compound on drug suspicions but found no drugs. Mcafee claims that at the time of the police raid, he was on the verge of a big breakthrough. In his quorum sensing medicine, the belize authorities came to his home and asked him to make a 2 million donation when he refused they barged into his home, killed his dogs and restrained him for 14 hours.

He claims that the authorities were very corrupt and did not feel safe staying there around the same time, one of mcafee's neighbors, a fellow american expat by the name of gregory fowle, was found murdered in his home with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Gregory had a poor relationship with mcafee, especially with relation to mcafee's, extremely aggressive security dogs. By this point, mcafee did not believe he would get a fair trial and fled when the police came to question him about the incident. He fled to neighboring guatemala, where he was soon apprehended on charges of illegal entry into the country.

Belize wanted mcafee extradited, so he could face questioning about the death of gregory fall, not wanting to go back. Mcafee pretended to have a heart attack to buy his lawyers. More time they successfully appealed the police extradition ruling and he was deported back to the us in 2012, so he was safe from prosecution. After getting back to the us in 2012, he met his eventual wife, janice dyson, and they eventually moved to tennessee.

By this point, he had given up his herbal medicine ambitions and went back to his roots. As a cyber security engineer. In 2014, he created a smartphone cyber security application called decentral one after the 2016 san bernardino terrorist attack, mcafee volunteered to help the fbi hack into the perpetrator's iphone to expose any possible links to other terrorists. The fbi never took him up on the offer and he later admitted that as a publicity stunt, his d central one app ended up being something of a flop, never really catching on or making him a significant amount of money.

With his business ventures, not going as well as planned, mcafee turned his attention to politics in 2015.. He ran for president under the banner of cyber party, a new party that he created. His main contention was that the current political leaders of both major parties were illiterate. In issues of cyber security, with everything becoming more and more connected to the internet, the risk of a catastrophic cyber attack against critical infrastructure was increasing as a pioneer in the cyber security industry.

Mcafee was uniquely qualified to protect the country from threats of this nature. When his cyber party failed to generate significant interest, he dissolved it and instead joined the libertarian party to run in their presidential primary his long-held. Personal views were consistent with the libertarian party, especially with regards to recreational substances and taxation. The former he thought should be completely legalized in a ladder he viewed as illegal when he gained traction with some elements of the libertarian voter base.

Many people viewed him as unelectable, given the suspicious death of his neighbor and believes as well as his prior dui and firearm-related arrests. He finished second place in the primary, but only received 3 400 votes compared to rival gary johnson's 22 000.. With his presidential run in cyber security ventures, ending in failure, mcafee was getting desperate in 2016. He claimed to have hacked into the encrypted online messaging app whatsapp.

He supposedly found a vulnerability in the android operating system, which, let him do this. If true, this would have given him much needed publicity and increased demand for the new anti-virus products that he was developing. Unfortunately, this gimmick turned out to be a fabrication. He was only able to hack into whatsapp by pre-installing malware onto the phone he couldn't actually hack into whatsapp on a phone he never touched before through his failed real estate investments, adventures and believes his general partying lifestyle.

By this point, he had burned through almost the entire 100 million dollars that he made from the mcafee antivirus, so he decided to start fresh once again this time, focusing on cryptocurrencies to his credit, john mcafee has been bullish on crypto since at least 2013 in public Interviews when the price started skyrocketing in 2017, he went all in. He would go on cable channels. Saying things like crypto is the most important invention for humanity. Since the agricultural revolution in 2018, he said that it would be mathematically impossible for bitcoin to be less than one million dollars per coin by the end of 2020..

He shifted his focus away from cyber security and focused on bitcoin mining. His bullish stance on bitcoin made him very popular among some segments of the crypto community and he became very influential on twitter racking up hundreds of thousands and eventually more than one million followers starting in late 2017 mcafee would start tweeting about various cryptocurrencies calling them coin Of the day or queen of the week, he often tweeted about altcoins with low liquidity. For example, he talked about one called red coin, which supposedly works with every major social media platform. It is the only major coin that is widely known among kids under the age of 10., when he tweeted many of his followers would buy the coin, pushing up the price.

What he didn't disclose to his followers is that he and his crypto team would buy up a large stake in these altcoins prior to the tweet and sell them soon. After most of the coins that he promoted eventually ended up, losing the vast majority of their values. Over the following months and years, this is a classic pump and dump operation mcafee and his team allegedly made two million dollars from these schemes. According to a department of justice investigation, he would also accept illegal payments from founders of new altcoins to promote their initial coin.

Offerings he allegedly made an additional 11 million dollars from that, and his legal troubles didn't end there. In january of 2019, he publicly stated that he had not paid income taxes in any of the past eight years as he viewed taxation as theft. He said that this would make him a prime target for the internal revenue service, and he was certainly right about that. Following a grand jury indictment on tax evasion, charges mcafee fled the us and lived on a boat in international waters for a number of months.

Apparently he sailed all the way across the atlantic ocean and by 2020 ended up in spain in october of 2020. Spanish authorities arrested him and planned to extradite him to the u.s. At this point, there was no way out facing 35 years for tax evasion and possibly even more for the pump and dumps the 75 year old had finally hit rock bottom. While out on bail in spain, mcafee tweeted to his followers explaining the situation, he said he lost everything.

His crypto assets had all either been stolen by his associates or seized by the government. All of his friends abandoned him in fear of association in june of 2021. He died by hanging in a spanish jail cell in what the authorities said was a suicide, but some people, including his widow, janice mcafee, doubted the official story. She didn't believe that mcafee would kill himself and blame the u.s authorities for what she called politically motivated charges against him.

Mcafee had long been critical of the us government, particularly with regards to nasa's surveillance of u.s citizens, the irs's tax enforcement and other issues. In fact, as far back as 2019, mcafee said that u.s officials were coming for him and if he dies, it won't be a suicide. He also claimed to have 31 terabytes of secret data, which could expose corrupt cia agents and bohemian officials. If he is arrested or made to disappear.

He will release this data to the internet. To date, no such data has been released, while some people view his apparent suicide as suspicious. It's important to remember that by this point he had lost everything and would likely be condemned to die behind bars, regardless of what you think about john mcafee. Nobody can deny that he was a very influential man.

He pioneered the antivirus software space and his namesake company still protects hundreds of millions of computers to this day and even when he had more than enough money to retire, he never stopped trying new things from his quorum sensing research in belize to his presidential run. He will always be remembered as one of the most interesting men in america, alright guys that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about john mcafee? Do you think the government wanted to silence him? Let us know in the comments section below, as always. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one wall, street millennial, signing out.