John David McAfee

John David McAfee was born on a US Army base in Gloucestershire, England, to an American soldier and British mother, and was raised in Salem, Virginia. Working as a programmer for NASA's Institute for Space Studies, Univac, Xerox, and Lockheed, he recognized the emerging threat of computer viruses in 1986 following the Brain virus. In 1987, he founded McAfee Associates in his Santa Clara home, releasing VirusScan—the world's first commercial antivirus software suite.

McAfee took the company public in 1992 and resigned in 1994, selling his remaining stock for approximately $100 million. His later life was defined by extreme eccentricities, living off the grid in Belize, surviving a manhunt in 2012 over the suspicious death of a neighbor, running for US President on the Libertarian ticket, and promoting cryptocurrencies. In October 2020, he was arrested in Spain on US tax evasion charges and died in a Barcelona prison cell shortly after extradition was authorized.