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Comment by bennyp101 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, is that 100% true?

Even without being found guilty of murder... if you watch that documentary he hires very unsavory characters to be his armed guards 24x7.

You are one of the richest people on the planet and you choose to be an armed bully on a small island with a lot of poverty to exploit.

He could literally have any lifestyle he wanted.

He hadn't been one of the richest people on the planet in more than a decade.

Definitely did not have enough money for literally any lifestyle, especially seeing as it appears he owed a lot of money in back taxes.

He didn't strike me as a bully.

He seemed to like his dogs (which I get!), and was out for the little guys of the world. He didn't like authorities whom abused their power.

I found him refreshing compared to most wealthy guys.

I am sad he's gone. I wish it wasen't fear over the IRS though.

(I don't think anyone should do jail time over taxes. You can take their money, but no jail time. Oh yea, I don't care if he was doing drugs (prescribed, or illegial). I don't think anyone should have to go through withdrawls in a cell. That last sentence was not aimed at John. It never felt right hearing that people are expected to withdrawal from any substance while in jail. I see a constant help wanted in my local paper for a Psychiatry position at San Quentin. If I was in charge, every suspect would have a Psychiatrist they can talk to, and medicated if needed, with in a hour of being locked up for any offense. It's got to be one of the most stressful event in a person's life.)

> He seemed to like his dogs

We offered the McAffees a puppy shortly after they moved to TN; they came out and played with the litter for a couple hours in our front yard, and they were both very much "dog people".

Our pack wasn't aggressive, as such, but everyone found them intimidating. John was quite happy being chewed by multiple small hounds, and the rest of the pack was OK with the idea of him having a pup.

Alas, they weren't stable enough to give a good home to a dog at that time (and told us so before the pup was ready), so that puppy went elsewhere; but I was delighted to meet them both and found them decent people to spend a bit with.

> weren't stable enough to give a good home to a dog

That was my instinct as well, after John told the story about paying his Belizean housekeepers to shit into his mouth from a hammock.

Had a net worth of several hundred million in a country where the cost of living was 23% of the US might not be a "megayacht and private 787" lifestyle, but it would do pretty well.

He owed a lot of money in back taxes because he made a point of specifically refusing to pay them, not inability to do so.

His net worth peaked at $100M right before the 2008 financial crisis, which apparently decimated his investments.

If you spend a lot of money without paying your taxes, you still owe those taxes, which means you have significantly less money than you think you do. So when his aforementioned wealth peaked at $100M, the real value (i.e. minus taxes) was probably much lower.

Not withstanding the amount, I'm willing to be corrected there, but the latter part makes little sense:

Say I have $1M in the bank (or in Bitcoin), but I owe the IRS say $300K.

I leave the country, and take my money out of the reach of the IRS.

My "net worth" on an accounting statement might be $700K, but if I'm making a point of avoiding and biting my thumb at the IRS, I still absolute have access to $1M, regardless of moneys owed or claimed. And if I have no intention of paying those taxes, I'm certainly going to use that money. And McAfee was very actively saying "I'm keeping that owed tax and doing whatever the hell I like with it".

The IRS can seize assets. McAfee wasn't sitting on $100M in hard cash, most was in property and investments.

According to [0] he was down to about $4M in net worth after 2008, which isn't nothing, especially in a LCOL country, but for context, if he made 200k per year and put 10% away for retirement from when he was 25, he would have had the same amount.

[0] https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/...

Given that McAfee himself claimed he had assets seized by the feds and had nothing at the end, I don't think even McAfee was ever as far out of reach as you think he was.

Suppose your assets lost 70 percent of their value soon after the tax year ended. Now your net worth is 300k while your tax bill is 400k, and you can only slowly get the over-payment back by deducting it against your current taxes.

We are assuming McAfee is just not paying taxes because craziness, but when you have volatile situation you can get burned by the rules pretty badly.

If I remember the story correctly the neighbour killed his dogs. That’s a pretty strong motive.

Actually, John killed his own dogs after he believed they were poisoned by his neighbor. Were they really poisoned, or was that just one of his psychotic delusions(like his claim that Belizean officials were out to kill him but killed Faull by mistake)?

We'll never know. But we do know that his dogs were allowed to run free in a giant pack and attacked at least 6 people (probably more, but they may be locals and not ex-pats/tourists whose claims are more likely to be reported on)

He claimed that he gifted laptops to the Belizean government pre-loaded with spyware and alleged to have found evidence that multiple top officials were engaged in drug and human trafficking.

If true, would certainly be a motive for those officials.

> He claimed that he gifted laptops to the Belizean government pre-loaded with spyware and alleged to have found evidence that multiple top officials were engaged in drug and human trafficking.

So he was looking to take out his competitors? Because he boasted of having sold 25KG of psychotropics in the previous year, so let's not mistake him for some vigilante.

Do you have a source for that? I don't doubt you, but I'd like to read the story.

> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/the-obscure-legal-dr...

Quantity claims:

> https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/8utitu/john_mcafe...

Wow, that reddit thread is really something. Thanks

Weird he never provided any proof of his claims about that. You would think that if he was invested enough to put his own life in risk(according to him) to find out the extent of corruption among officials in Belize, that he would, perhaps, release the information in some manner instead of just pretending like it never existed.

And what was the thinking of the officials who allegedly received the laptops? "Oh no, the man who gave us free laptops has been reading everything we've done on these laptops. Let's plan his murder on these laptops now. Don't worry about finding his address, it's just some home north of San Pedro right? Just go kill a guy and it must be John"

He mentioned in his tweets a lot will be released upon his death. We'll see I guess.

To anyone reading this: I will bet literally any amount of money that is available to me, with 10:1 odds, that no information will come out.

Didn’t McAfee bet to eat His own penis for some reason?

And lost, and refused to honor the bet.

It was over the price of bitcoin.

You waiting for any Q drops too?

There was a Q posted to his Instagram account an hour after his death was reported. Popcorn ready.

This is how conspiracies are created. There's no evidence and strong motive for him to create this conspiracy.

I'm a big fan of Occam's razor and in this case the simplest explanation, in light of _evidence_ of which there was plenty in the documentary, is that he was not truthful.

To be a bit pedantic, testimony is evidence. But I agree he was not very credible.

"Actually, John killed his own dogs after he believed they were poisoned by his neighbor."

I've never heard he killed his dogs. I did hear he thought the next door neighbor poisoned his dogs.

He shot his dogs and buried them on his property (allegedly, because he thought they were poisoned). The last I heard of the dogs, the police had taken their corpses to see if they were shot with the same gun that murdered Faull. But odds seem low since it was known that John had a ton of guns and armed guards in Belize.

John Wick agrees

This makes me wonder if he was a source of inspiration for the movies...

Sounds like someone else with the same first name and motive.

Probably (by which I refer to the standard of judgement in the civil suit). https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/20/mcafee_25m_lawsuit_ne...

That was a default judgement, which means he automatically lost because he didn't show up to court, not on the merit of the suit.

No it doesn’t mean that. He didn’t automatically lose because he didn’t show up. The court, specifically the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, allowed the Faull estate to petition for a default judgement due to McAfee’s continued failure to respond and due to the merits of the case presented. They did not, and would not, allow a default judgment on a meritless case.

Meritless cases don't even make it that far (the court refuses to hear the case), so while true this seems like an unnecessary quibble. Yes, the suit had enough to actually be heard by a court, but the reason for the judgement is due to McAfee's refusal to even participate. Said another way: if McAfee had participated, this is not the judgement that would've been reached. McAfee may have still be found responsible by the court, but not for the same reason.

It is certainly not the normal level of proof people take a court decision as being.

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