| Flying John McAfee |
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Software entrepreneur and flying fanatic John McAfee is now a man without a mouse.
The company grew fast, but eventually McAfee became bored and sold off all his shares. (The company, which still bears his name, grossed $1 billion last year.) A few years later he started a new company, Tribal Voice, with a new idea: sending text messages over the Internet. Within three months he had four million users. McAfee sold the company in 1999 for $17 million. While McAfee was riding up the escalator to wealth, he was simultaneously creating a life of unencumbered freedom. “Ever since I was 22, I’d work for a year, then take off and travel for a year,” he says. He has lived in New York City, Brazil, and Germany. He has traveled through Mexico, living in a van, buying stones and silver and having them made into jewelry to sell to tourists. Later, back in the States, he became infatuated with racing four-wheel ATVs (he has totaled ten of them) and with making long-distance, open-ocean voyages on Jet Skis (he’s sunk nine). He loved business, at least the startup part—“There’s no structure, no bureaucracy, just a group of people trying to do something magical,” he says—but by the time he sold Tribal Voice, he was done with the moneymaking hustle. “The goal of having enough money is irrational,” he says. “You think you’re free, but you’re not. You have obligations, responsibilities, worries, and cares. The more money you have, the less free you are. Look at the big yachts you see floating around. The bigger they are, the less their owners use them. Their kids, their friends, their business associates, sure—but not them. Success for me is, can you wake up in the morning and feel like a 12-year-old? You know, when you can go outside, see a strange kid, and say, ‘Hey, do you want to play?’ Can you get back to that?” My second day in rodeo, a ferocious windstorm kicks up, with gusts up to 50 miles per hour. It would be too dangerous to fly, so in the afternoon McAfee shows me his collection of ATVs. Ten minutes later we’re roaring across the desert plain, dodging mesquite bushes. At a dry streambed, we work our way down its steep bank, and then roar along its narrow graveled bottom, leaving a rooster plume of dust in our wake. When we reach a sandstone escarpment, a short hike leads us to the remains of an ancient Indian settlement sheltering beneath an overhang. McAfee points out a petroglyph on the cliff and says it was probably painted some 2,000 years ago. |
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