The programming wiz has had many endeavors in cybersecurity, cryptocurrency, and IT, but John McAfee is also known for his eccentric stunts and tweets. In today’s article, we will be trying to estimate the net worth of John McAfee by looking at his professional achievements and losses.
John McAfee Career
Born in 1945, John David McAfee is a British-American programmer and businessman. Starting from 1968 to 1970, McAfee was employed as a programmer at NASA. He then joined the creators of the first digital computer ENIAC at the UNIVAC company. His next job was as a software designer at Xerox.
In the early ’80s, McAfee joined Lockheed, and while working there he saw first-hand the impact of the first computer virus. This is what drove McAfee to begin developing the anti-virus software for which he is still known to this day.
In 1987, the McAfee Associates was founded, and the IT company became a hit when it launched its McAfee antivirus software. McAfee was active as head of the company until 1994 when he sold his shares for $100 million to Intel.
McAfee then founded Tribal Voice, which created one of the first Internet messengers, called PowWow, but the project was not that successful. In 2000, he invested and became one of the directors of the Zone Labs company, which developed firewall software. The company was then bought in 2003 by Check Point Software.
In 2010, he founded QuorumEx, a company that would make antibiotics based on quorum sensing, but this endeavor also failed to garner success.
McAfee then fled to Belize due to accusations of his alleged involvement in numerous criminal activities. After he returned to the US in December 2012, Future Tense Central was established, which was first designed to produce a computer network security device but then became a business incubator.
The next project developed by McAfee was the Cognizant cybersecurity app that verified the permissions of all the apps installed on one smartphone. But after Android Lollipop 5.0 was released in 2015, this feature was installed by default and made the app obsolete. In 2016 and then again in 2020, McAfee ran for President but lost both elections.
In 2016 John McAfee became the CEO of MGT Capital Investments, a company that was initially for social gaming but its focus then shifted to cybersecurity. The company then set up its own Bitcoin mining operation, and during that time, the shares of the company went up in price. McAfee resigned from the company 2 years later.
Since 2018, McAfee became the CEO of Luxcore, a company focused on providing crypto enterprise solutions.
John McAfee Net Worth 2020
It is impossible to exactly estimate John McAfee net worth, with some saying it to be anywhere between $4 and $15 million, while others even believe that he still has $100 million. The estimates which place the tech guru’s worth to $4 million should also be taken with a grain of salt, as they do not offer any concrete details on how they came up with this sum.
According to the New York Times, McAfee lost most of the money he accrued in 2008 when the financial crisis happened. In a Forbes article, it was stated that McAfee was left with only $4 million out of the 100 million he made from selling McAfee Associates.
This is the main argument brought when estimating that the John McAfee net worth is $4 million, but it was not specified if that was all McAfee owned. However, at the moment, the Forbes article cannot be found online. There was a reference to the Forbes article in the New York Times in 2009 as the source from where the $4 million wealth estimate was cited. Strangely enough, there are no mentions of McAfee in the original Forbes article.
McAfee fled to and lived in Belize for several years until December of 2012, as he was accused of the murder of his neighbor.
A CNN article posted in 2014 wrote:
“On Tuesday, McAfee told CNNMoney he’s lost everything. Only a tiny fraction of his one-time $100 million net worth survived the 2008 market crash. But his fortunes really took a hit in 2012, when McAfee fled Belize police who aggressively sought him for questioning on the death of his neighbor.
The government raided his jungle compound and seized everything inside. The buildings on McAfee’s property later burned down under suspicious circumstances.”
“Everything I owned was in Belize. I left with nothing in my pocket,” stated McAfee at that time.
McAfee also stated that most of his remaining wealth was in the vast art collection he left behind in the country. “He claims that the Belize government auctioned off many of his belongings, but his art pieces never showed up,”- read the CNN article.
The NYT article also stated that he sold his 10,000-square-foot home in Colorado for $5.7 million, as well as his 5.34-acre oceanfront estate in Hawaii for $1.5 million (we will be taking into account this $7.2 million later in our article).
After leaving Belize, he started in 2014 cybersecurity company, Future Tense Central, and launched the DCentral 1 app, but there is no way of knowing how much he made with those ventures. During his exile in Canada, he took on consulting work by giving acquisitions, technology, and internal restructuring advice to firms. Again, there is no data that might show how much he made during that time.
In 2016, he started working for the MGT company, and during his time there, he received a bonus of $600,000, while also collecting a salary and consulting fee of half a million dollars. Two years later, McAfee retired and took with him 5 million company shares which were worth around $100,000 ($0.02 per share). Based on these numbers, we can estimate that during his time at MGT, he made around $1.7 million.
In 2017, John McAfee began actively supporting and defending cryptocurrencies and their use. He then started making cryptocurrency price predictions on Twitter. It was then speculated that he was paid by the cryptocurrency project owners $100,000 per tweet to promote their coins and boost their ICOs. McAfee promoted 50 ICOs by the end of 2018. It was estimated that he made around $5 million through Twitter.
According to some records, he was also paid in cryptocurrencies, with an average payment of 8 BTC per tweet, which meant that he collected around 500 BTC in total. With the current rate of BTC, this sum would amount to at least $4.5 million. Up until now, McAfee has around $6.2 million.
By the way, we do not know how much McAffe made as the CEO of the Luxcore company.
John McAfee Net Worth: Minimum and Maximum Estimates
We have the $6.2 million estimate made above by taking into account his past business endeavors. With his sold properties (that we know of), $7.2 million added to $6.2 million, and with the $4 million, it makes $17.4. Assuming he spent or lost some of the money made on his properties, he should have a minimum of around $10 million.
Conclusion
This has been our article focusing on the estimation of the John McAfee net worth. Keep in mind that this was purely speculation based on the data we have available, meaning he could in fact have much more or much less in his bank account.
Featured image: bloomberg.com
