John McAfee, the provocative millionaire founder of antivirus software company McAfee Software, which Intel bought for $7.68 billion in 2010, today filed a document to officially designate himself a candidate in next year’s U.S. presidential election.
Update on Sept. 9: Watch McAfee’s official campaign announcement video below:
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“I am founding a new party yet to be announced,” McAfee wrote in the document (PDF) submitted to the Federal Election Commission, on behalf of the new committee McAfee for President. A spokesman later confirmed to VentureBeat that McAfee is running under the new “Cyber Party.” (Hat tip to The Hill for reporting on the filing.)
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McAfee’s Twitter and Facebook accounts promise an “official announcement” tomorrow.
John McAfee, 69, left McAfee Software in 1994 after starting the company seven years earlier. Intel renamed it Intel Security last year. McAfee for President has a location in Alabama, far from McAfee Software’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
Other candidates in the 2016 presidential race include Creative Commons cofounder Lawrence Lessig, former HP chief executive Carly Fiorina, and real estate mogul Donald Trump.
But John McAfee is one-of-a-kind. He’s picked up plenty of publicity since the Intel deal, and not necessarily of the best type, despite his historical role in the information security market.
In 2012, police in Belize were reportedly on the hunt for McAfee following the murder of his neighbor.
In 2013, he released a video showing people how to uninstall the McAfee antivirus software. The video, which is no longer available, includes violence, nudity, and drug use. Another 2013 video shows McAfee firing a .50-caliber gun.
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In 2014, during a talk at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas, McAfee announced a new complaint-filing website, Brownlist.
A few weeks later, he responded to an email from former VentureBeat writer Richard Byrne Reilly by noting that the voices in his head “have calmed down tremendously in the past few months and they now speak quietly, and mostly about the carnivorous aliens that incessantly follow me and about the Hungarian elves that, not infrequently, steal my shoes.”
Last month, in an Ask Me Anything conversation on Reddit, he wrote that “I have a graphic novel coming out and Warner Brothers is making a movie.”
He also mentioned that he uses multiple device operating systems. “The reason I do that is it makes it more difficult for the people trying to tap me, NSA, CIA, FBI,” he wrote.
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