5 ms·

Antivirus Software Pioneer John McAfee Loses Fortune (2009)

142 points by a5seo 15y ago

lionhearted 15y ago
> In McAfee's case, his Rodeo paradise -- on which he's spent millions -- drew only a few modest bids. The home, which included the airstrip and hangar, sold for $525,000 to a couple from the Washington, D.C., suburbs. "It's a little less than what I paid for the landscaping," he said. "Somebody got a great deal." I wonder how much that's worth now.
- Luc 15y ago
  I was curious - here's some pictures and a map of the place, now called the 'Painted Pony Resort': http://wikimapia.org/13741915/Painted-Pony-Resort http://wikimapia.org/13741915/Painted-Pony-Resort
  - rokhayakebe 15y ago
    Ok, I wouldn't spend $100,000 for that.
    - nkp007 15y ago
      I see the Bluth model home has expanded.
  - mikecolella 15y ago
    I have been there and taken a flying lesson in a "trike" from the airfield. It wasn't a luxurious place.
acangiano 15y ago
Sad story, but I love that he is at it again. According to Wikipedia: "Beginning in February 2010, John started a new venture in the field of bacterial quorum sensing. His new company QuorumEx is headquartered in Belize and is working towards producing commercial all natural antibiotics based on anti-quorum sensing technology." I just love how the man, even at 66, still swings for the fences. He doesn't dick around with small projects and SaaS. He seems to have a track record of going after game changing technologies.
- SwellJoe 15y ago
  There's nothing sad about this story. He's still worth $10m. He will never want for food, shelter, a new Porsche, etc. Sure, a lot of money was wasted on extravagant things, and he's found that the market value of a private playground in a desolate stretch of desert is not very high. But, that doesn't make the story sad. He's not a stupid man; he can't have imagined that these things would sell for what he spent on them.
  - acangiano 15y ago
    Perhaps we have a different perception. To me, destruction of his personal wealth (going from $100M to $4M) is sad. Sure, he made bad investment choices, and I'm in no way implying that he'll starve or go homeless, but I still find it sad. On the plus side, the man seems to have rediscovered his true self in the process.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      True, though he actually seems to personally feel relieved by the loss. It sounds like he got stuck in a luxury-consumption trap, where he was spending all his time trying to live a multimillionaire's life (because he could), instead of things like starting companies. Now that most of it's gone he's back to new intellectual endeavors.
    - SwellJoe 15y ago
      No actual wealth was destroyed. The real wealth may have gone from one rich man's pockets to another's. Or, in this case, a lot of it "trickled down" into the pockets of all the people who built his expensive playground and toys. Money is a representation of value; some of the "wealth" in this story was merely the result of a real estate bubble...it wasn't actually representative of longterm value, and he made poor bets on those properties. Some of it was transferred from one person to another, for the enjoyment of the spender, and resulted in goods that have much lower value to the market in general than to the original purchaser. That's pretty common of luxury goods. A new million dollar yacht will sell for dramatically less a few years later. It's not sad, it's just normal depreciation on luxury goods, and should be expected by anyone purchasing luxury goods. The extreme specificity and quirkiness of his luxury goods spending makes it even more likely to experience extreme depreciation.
hammock 15y ago
Paper-rich assets inflated by the bubble are being repriced for everyone, not just one guy. An airplane is still an airplane, the fact that its unrealized paper value is less does not change its intrinsic qualities. The tragedy is when you have debt, etc and are forced to sell in a down market.
dmaz 15y ago
For more insight into McAfee's mind (and a bit of a "before" picture), take a look at Outside magazine's article from February 2008, "Flying John McAfee". http://outsidego.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=152&pop=1&page=0 http://outsidego.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=...
diminish 15y ago
"..My father always said, 'Real estate, you can't lose in real estate' ... you know, oddly enough you can." Mine says it too..
- carsongross 15y ago
  The current crisis is going to destroy that nostrum, and reduce real estate to what it is: a depreciating liability/consumable that produces no wealth and that has high transaction costs. Leverage has been the name of the game for 30 years, and the mortgage has been the only way that the little guys could play that in a major way. There was a thread a while back talking about how to rationally buy a house, and bunch of people mentioned what a great hedge real estate is against inflation. But no one talked about deflation. Look at the BONES, man: http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/japanindex.gif http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/japa...
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    I agree that real estate suffers cycles like anything, but how is it a consumable?
    - carsongross 15y ago
      Just in the sense that housing, and in particular new housing, had shifted to the rapid-turnover, quickly depreciating model of a consumable: shoddy workmanship, rapid depreciation and rapid discarding of used goods. At a purely technical level, despite the best efforts of the housing industry, we do not appear to have yet build a significant number of houses that are totally worthless after three years, so I admit some hyperbole in that characterization.
zobzu 15y ago
id be pretty happy with 10M and nothing to worry about.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
There are so many experiences to have in life, you would think that people with a lot of wealth would have many of them. But, as this article points out, it's easy to trap yourself with the things you like. Like fishing? You buy a huge boat. Like flying? You spend millions on a cool plane. Like scenery? You buy several houses. Pretty soon, all your time and energy goes into the things you own. Or, as people say, the things own you instead of you owning the things. John puts it very well: you can only live in one place at a time. Once my startups begin to mature, I plan on renting just about everything. That way I can try many different things without the pain of ownership. If I find myself doing something over and over again -- and it would have to be dozens of times -- I might consider buying something permanently. Maybe. Concentrate on experiences, not possessions (or money) EDIT: I heard somebody refer to what happened as a "luxury consumption trap." Just wanted to add that nothing about this has anything to do with the amount of money involved. This is more about your relationship to the things you own, however much they might cost. You can tie yourself up with five dollar items as easily as you can five million-dollar items. (It's true, however, that people seem especially blind about this when this happens with larger-ticket items.)
- iuguy 15y ago
  I can't agree enough. I used to buy toys all the time (you know, exotic workstations on different architectures, fancy PDAs and so on, you probably know the drill) and realised after a while that I had a whole load of few year old tech that I never really used. These days I cut back. The only thing I really spend money on is travel, accommodation and food. Possessions only tend to stick around for short periods of time. Experiences stay with you forever. I don't think I've ever met anyone who on their deathbed was likely to say, "I wish I had more stuff"
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    "Possessions only tend to stick around for short periods of time. Experiences stay with you forever." Absolutely. My parents bought me lots of presents for birthdays and Christmas. When I was about 12 they took me to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. I played that sucker hard that day. I don't remember any of the presents. I still remember that day. I'm over 50. Think about that, when you want to do something for your kids, or your spouse. Or yourself.
daew 15y ago
There is speculation that he sold off all his assets and moved them all to Belize etc to protect himself from lawsuits, including a wrongful death lawsuit. http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1615167/print http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1615167/print
rokhayakebe 15y ago
This is a life-long training and you do not need to be a millionaire to do it. Look around your apartment, house, bedroom or closet. I guarantee you 75% of what is there you haven't used more than twice in the past month. In my case I just bag stuff I do not find myself using and take a trip to Goodwill. Ah, sometimes it feels so good to have less things.
Arjuna 15y ago
This is a link to the related interview segment with McAfee that appeared on Nightline. http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8468447 http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8468447
andyjenn 15y ago
"I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted” - George Best
abbasmehdi 15y ago
Inspiring story that seperates needs.from wants. Somebody found the uninstall button on the pre loaded AntiVirus (puns intended) ;)
sleight42 15y ago
"Luxury" is relative. McAfee is cited as saying, “We are the ultimate consumer society. If you succeed within that culture, then you’re simply more bonded to it.” Any item in your possession or service that you command that exceeds your functional needs of it is, for you, a luxury. It's not just about the rich. Can you truly claim that you need that 60" television to watch your favorite sporting match? Have you seen Independence Day? I found the movie highly ironic. Talking to my father about the movie sometime after watching it, I remember remarking that what separated us from the aliens bent on annihilating us to consume our planet for its natural resources was one thing: time.
naner 15y ago
In McAfee's case, his Rodeo paradise -- on which he's spent millions -- drew only a few modest bids. The home, which included the airstrip and hangar, sold for $525,000 to a couple from the Washington, D.C., suburbs. "It's a little less than what I paid for the landscaping," he said. "Somebody got a great deal." Yeah, if they can afford the upkeep.
johnx123-up 15y ago
Sad story. I vaguely predicted that AV market would crash when I first saw crowd power on social antivirus at http://socialav.com/ http://socialav.com/

142 points by a5seo 15y ago

> In McAfee's case, his Rodeo paradise -- on which he's spent millions -- drew only a few modest bids. The home, which included the airstrip and hangar, sold for $525,000 to a couple from the Washington, D.C., suburbs. "It's a little less than what I paid for the landscaping," he said. "Somebody got a great deal." I wonder how much that's worth now.

Luc 15y ago
I was curious - here's some pictures and a map of the place, now called the 'Painted Pony Resort': http://wikimapia.org/13741915/Painted-Pony-Resort http://wikimapia.org/13741915/Painted-Pony-Resort
- rokhayakebe 15y ago
  Ok, I wouldn't spend $100,000 for that.
  - nkp007 15y ago
    I see the Bluth model home has expanded.
- mikecolella 15y ago
  I have been there and taken a flying lesson in a "trike" from the airfield. It wasn't a luxurious place.

acangiano 15y ago

Sad story, but I love that he is at it again. According to Wikipedia: "Beginning in February 2010, John started a new venture in the field of bacterial quorum sensing. His new company QuorumEx is headquartered in Belize and is working towards producing commercial all natural antibiotics based on anti-quorum sensing technology." I just love how the man, even at 66, still swings for the fences. He doesn't dick around with small projects and SaaS. He seems to have a track record of going after game changing technologies.

SwellJoe 15y ago
There's nothing sad about this story. He's still worth $10m. He will never want for food, shelter, a new Porsche, etc. Sure, a lot of money was wasted on extravagant things, and he's found that the market value of a private playground in a desolate stretch of desert is not very high. But, that doesn't make the story sad. He's not a stupid man; he can't have imagined that these things would sell for what he spent on them.
- acangiano 15y ago
  Perhaps we have a different perception. To me, destruction of his personal wealth (going from $100M to $4M) is sad. Sure, he made bad investment choices, and I'm in no way implying that he'll starve or go homeless, but I still find it sad. On the plus side, the man seems to have rediscovered his true self in the process.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    True, though he actually seems to personally feel relieved by the loss. It sounds like he got stuck in a luxury-consumption trap, where he was spending all his time trying to live a multimillionaire's life (because he could), instead of things like starting companies. Now that most of it's gone he's back to new intellectual endeavors.
  - SwellJoe 15y ago
    No actual wealth was destroyed. The real wealth may have gone from one rich man's pockets to another's. Or, in this case, a lot of it "trickled down" into the pockets of all the people who built his expensive playground and toys. Money is a representation of value; some of the "wealth" in this story was merely the result of a real estate bubble...it wasn't actually representative of longterm value, and he made poor bets on those properties. Some of it was transferred from one person to another, for the enjoyment of the spender, and resulted in goods that have much lower value to the market in general than to the original purchaser. That's pretty common of luxury goods. A new million dollar yacht will sell for dramatically less a few years later. It's not sad, it's just normal depreciation on luxury goods, and should be expected by anyone purchasing luxury goods. The extreme specificity and quirkiness of his luxury goods spending makes it even more likely to experience extreme depreciation.

hammock 15y ago

Paper-rich assets inflated by the bubble are being repriced for everyone, not just one guy. An airplane is still an airplane, the fact that its unrealized paper value is less does not change its intrinsic qualities. The tragedy is when you have debt, etc and are forced to sell in a down market.

dmaz 15y ago

For more insight into McAfee's mind (and a bit of a "before" picture), take a look at Outside magazine's article from February 2008, "Flying John McAfee". http://outsidego.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=152&pop=1&page=0 http://outsidego.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=...

diminish 15y ago

"..My father always said, 'Real estate, you can't lose in real estate' ... you know, oddly enough you can." Mine says it too..

carsongross 15y ago
The current crisis is going to destroy that nostrum, and reduce real estate to what it is: a depreciating liability/consumable that produces no wealth and that has high transaction costs. Leverage has been the name of the game for 30 years, and the mortgage has been the only way that the little guys could play that in a major way. There was a thread a while back talking about how to rationally buy a house, and bunch of people mentioned what a great hedge real estate is against inflation. But no one talked about deflation. Look at the BONES, man: http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/japanindex.gif http://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/japa...
- sixtofour 15y ago
  I agree that real estate suffers cycles like anything, but how is it a consumable?
  - carsongross 15y ago
    Just in the sense that housing, and in particular new housing, had shifted to the rapid-turnover, quickly depreciating model of a consumable: shoddy workmanship, rapid depreciation and rapid discarding of used goods. At a purely technical level, despite the best efforts of the housing industry, we do not appear to have yet build a significant number of houses that are totally worthless after three years, so I admit some hyperbole in that characterization.

zobzu 15y ago

id be pretty happy with 10M and nothing to worry about.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

There are so many experiences to have in life, you would think that people with a lot of wealth would have many of them. But, as this article points out, it's easy to trap yourself with the things you like. Like fishing? You buy a huge boat. Like flying? You spend millions on a cool plane. Like scenery? You buy several houses. Pretty soon, all your time and energy goes into the things you own. Or, as people say, the things own you instead of you owning the things. John puts it very well: you can only live in one place at a time. Once my startups begin to mature, I plan on renting just about everything. That way I can try many different things without the pain of ownership. If I find myself doing something over and over again -- and it would have to be dozens of times -- I might consider buying something permanently. Maybe. Concentrate on experiences, not possessions (or money) EDIT: I heard somebody refer to what happened as a "luxury consumption trap." Just wanted to add that nothing about this has anything to do with the amount of money involved. This is more about your relationship to the things you own, however much they might cost. You can tie yourself up with five dollar items as easily as you can five million-dollar items. (It's true, however, that people seem especially blind about this when this happens with larger-ticket items.)

iuguy 15y ago
I can't agree enough. I used to buy toys all the time (you know, exotic workstations on different architectures, fancy PDAs and so on, you probably know the drill) and realised after a while that I had a whole load of few year old tech that I never really used. These days I cut back. The only thing I really spend money on is travel, accommodation and food. Possessions only tend to stick around for short periods of time. Experiences stay with you forever. I don't think I've ever met anyone who on their deathbed was likely to say, "I wish I had more stuff"
- sixtofour 15y ago
  "Possessions only tend to stick around for short periods of time. Experiences stay with you forever." Absolutely. My parents bought me lots of presents for birthdays and Christmas. When I was about 12 they took me to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. I played that sucker hard that day. I don't remember any of the presents. I still remember that day. I'm over 50. Think about that, when you want to do something for your kids, or your spouse. Or yourself.

daew 15y ago

There is speculation that he sold off all his assets and moved them all to Belize etc to protect himself from lawsuits, including a wrongful death lawsuit. http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1615167/print http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1615167/print

rokhayakebe 15y ago

This is a life-long training and you do not need to be a millionaire to do it. Look around your apartment, house, bedroom or closet. I guarantee you 75% of what is there you haven't used more than twice in the past month. In my case I just bag stuff I do not find myself using and take a trip to Goodwill. Ah, sometimes it feels so good to have less things.

Arjuna 15y ago

This is a link to the related interview segment with McAfee that appeared on Nightline. http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8468447 http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8468447

andyjenn 15y ago

"I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted” - George Best

abbasmehdi 15y ago

Inspiring story that seperates needs.from wants. Somebody found the uninstall button on the pre loaded AntiVirus (puns intended) ;)

sleight42 15y ago

"Luxury" is relative. McAfee is cited as saying, “We are the ultimate consumer society. If you succeed within that culture, then you’re simply more bonded to it.” Any item in your possession or service that you command that exceeds your functional needs of it is, for you, a luxury. It's not just about the rich. Can you truly claim that you need that 60" television to watch your favorite sporting match? Have you seen Independence Day? I found the movie highly ironic. Talking to my father about the movie sometime after watching it, I remember remarking that what separated us from the aliens bent on annihilating us to consume our planet for its natural resources was one thing: time.

naner 15y ago

In McAfee's case, his Rodeo paradise -- on which he's spent millions -- drew only a few modest bids. The home, which included the airstrip and hangar, sold for $525,000 to a couple from the Washington, D.C., suburbs. "It's a little less than what I paid for the landscaping," he said. "Somebody got a great deal." Yeah, if they can afford the upkeep.

johnx123-up 15y ago

Sad story. I vaguely predicted that AV market would crash when I first saw crowd power on social antivirus at http://socialav.com/ http://socialav.com/