# On the Run *A Biography of John Mcafee* — Legendary Biographies No. 110 - **Subject:** John David McAfee - **Written by:** Sterling Aldridge - **Shelf:** Technology & Money / Technology - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 192 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-107-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-171-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/110-on-the-run.html ## About this book June 23, 2021, the Brians 2 penitentiary in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires, Spain. John McAfee, seventy-five, the founder of the antivirus company that had borne his name, is found hanging in his cell. The Spanish National Court has approved his extradition to the United States on tax-evasion charges six hours earlier. The ruling is suicide. He had announced on Twitter the previous year that if he was ever found dead by suicide he had been killed. Sterling Aldridge's biography opens earlier — in Cinderford, Gloucestershire, where John David McAfee was born in 1945 to an American GI father and an English mother — and follows the arc through the Salem, Virginia, childhood, the Roanoke College mathematics degree, the long IT consulting at NASA, Lockheed, and Computer Sciences Corporation, the 1987 founding of McAfee Associates and the 1992 IPO, the 1994 retirement, the Belize compound years of 2008-2012 and the November 2012 disappearance into Guatemala after the murder of his neighbour Gregory Faull, the 2016 and 2020 Libertarian Party presidential campaigns, the long crypto-token endorsement years, the October 2020 Spanish arrest at the Barcelona-El Prat airport, the long Brians 2 detention, and the June 23, 2021 cell discovery. What emerges is a portrait of the antivirus-software founder whose 1990s fortune the IT-security industry continues to pay him for, and whose final decade the U.S. Internal Revenue Service spent trying to bring him back from a Belize compound, a Guatemalan border crossing, and a Spanish penitentiary. ## Contents 1. Cinderford 2. The Systems Man 3. The Virus Business 4. The Compound 5. Ambergris Caye 6. The Dogs, the Guns, the Neighbor 7. Running 8. Janice 9. The Libertarian Circus 10. The Crypto Prophet 11. The Tax Man 12. The Yacht 13. Brians 2 14. June 23 15. The Estate of Chaos 16. The Damage 17. The Virus 18. Cinderford Again 19. The Dead Man's Switch ## Questions **Who is On the Run about?** John David McAfee. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case On the Run — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,628 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 58,500 words, 19 chapters, 192 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Sterling Aldridge is an Atlanta-based business journalist whose work for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal has focused on the founders, fraudsters, and venture capitalists of the late-stage tech industry. After years of reporting on the ground, he transitioned to writing book-length portraits of industry figureheads. His biographies, including Satoshi, On the Run, and The Monopolist, examine the human cost of rapid technological scale. Other works like The Encino Hills, The Lanai Purchase, and The Five-Day Firing focus on the high-stakes boardroom battles that define modern Silicon Valley. He has also authored The Black Turtleneck and The Glen Park Library. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spends his free time restoring midcentury modern furniture and cycling through the city's historic neighborhoods.