Fear Made John McAfee Rich. IT ALSO RUINED HIM

The cybersecurity pioneer’s long, strange saga started in Silicon Valley and ended in a Spanish prison By 

- Jamie Tarabay and Matthew Bremner

The tattoo kind of said it all. In Cambrils, a beach community on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, Santiago Cuevas had already closed his shop, Scorpio Tattoo, for the 2019 holidays when a pushy customer talked his way in. The guy knew exactly what he wanted: a simple tat across the area just over his right bicep that read “$WHACKD.” He said it symbolized a desire “to know that I’m alive.” Cuevas and the man chatted amiably for the hour or so the job took. “He never told me who he was,” Cuevas recalls. “I found that out the following year.”

This was John McAfee, the software pioneer and supposed centimillionaire who, by the time he was sitting in Cuevas’s chair, had been broke and on the run for the better part of a decade. In the 1980s and ’90s he was a computing entrepreneur mentioned in some circles in the same breath as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He largely persuaded the emerging personal-computing industry first to fear holes in its security, then to outsource its defenses to him. By the end of that period, he’d cashed out and turned to rich-guy vanity projects. In the 21st century, however, his life began to unravel. He was named in a wrongful death lawsuit. His fortune seemed to evaporate overnight. On the run in Belize, he faced accusations of rape and murder. And by the time he met Cuevas in late 2019, he’d begun his final run from the law.

McAfee was given to brash hype and to conspiracy theories. Besides the