Heading to d10e in San Francisco.
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) July 18, 2016
Bitcoin techies are dangerous folks. Can't be too safe. pic.twitter.com/Rlt0hr5qtm
The fifth annual d10e conference, which has something to do with bitcoin, "disruptive tech," and "the hottest developments in decentralization," is happening today and tomorrow at the Marriott Marquis downtown, and guess who's still not in jail and is headed here to deliver the keynote address! John McAffee. And he will be armed.
McAfee tweeted the above yesterday showing the guns he's bringing to SF, saying (jokingly?), "Bitcoin techies are dangerous folks. Can't be too safe." (Hat tip: SF Weekly.)
As Yahoo Finance tells us, McAfee will be delivering the morning keynote at the conference on Wednesday, and there are apparently tickets available for a private meet-and-greet with him at Ozumo restaurant at 6 p.m. today.
Though we can not confirm that McAfee has a mental illness that may or may not have been brought on by years of drug use McAfee himself has insisted he is not crazy, and that all of his internet and on-camera craziness was just an act he did make headlines four years ago after being arrested in Belize, where he was living, on suspicion of manufacturing crystal meth. He was never charged in the crime, but then was on the run from Belizian authorities a few months later after a neighbor of his was found dead. McAfee was wanted for questioning in the crime, because he'd notably had a dispute with this neighbor, but claimed he did not trust the police and sought asylum in Guatemala before ultimately returning to the US via Miami and giving an interview to NBC Bay Area's Raj Mathai. He admitted to having multiple teenage girlfriends, two of whom he was trying to bring to the States, but would not talk about the dead neighbor.
As he told Wired in 2012, you could blame some of his erratic behavior on a bad trip he had in 1969, mistakenly snorting a whole bag of the drug DMT and having severe hallucinations and panic. “Within an hour my mind was shattered,” he said. And... "Part of him believes he’s still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination and that one day he’ll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon."
Since then, though, he founded McAfee Associates in 1989 in his Santa Clara home, makers of the 1990s-popular cybersecurity software, which was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion, and had multiple homes around the country until he sold them and disappeared into the jungles of Belize in 2009, claiming he was setting up a lab to research new antibiotics. His arrest in April 2014 on the meth charges he says was based on a fabrication by the government, as was the murder for which he was never arrested or charged but he's remained weirdly obsessed with guns, and many photos of him in the last several years feature him holding a firearm of some kind.
So, it's wholly in character that he would travel to a tech conference in SF with guns, it's just a little bit disturbing given the general mood of the country right now and the fact that the last thing we need is an arguably unstable millionaire (he claimed in 2013 to not have any money left, but it's believed he has a few million left of his onetime $100 million fortune), waving his guns around at a bunch of bitcoin Libertarians.
Oh, and did I mention he's running for President? Because he is.
Previously: Video: John McAfee Opens Up to NBC's Raj Mathai