McAfee's founder was glad when Intel took his name off the antivirus software
When Intel announced in 2014 that McAfee Security would become Intel Security, the happiest person may have been John McAfee himself. He had left the company two decades earlier and welcomed the split. The rebrand did not stick: by 2017 the business was independent again and back under his name.
John McAfee founded McAfee Associates in 1987, handed the chief executive job to Bill Larson in 1993 and resigned the following year. A 1997 merger with Network General, PGP and Helix created Network Associates. The company tried to broaden beyond antivirus into firewalls, encryption and public key infrastructure, and its research lab contributed code to Linux, FreeBSD, Darwin and the BIND name server. Antivirus still grew faster than everything else, and it remains the product people associate with the name.
In 2000 it led public warnings about the ILOVEYOU virus, one of the most destructive ever, but losses that year pushed out the chief executive, president and finance chief together. It went back to the McAfee name in 2004 after selling off side businesses. Another leadership purge followed in 2006 over questionable stock option practices. Then in April 2010 a faulty update, DAT 5958, crippled millions of Windows machines at home and at work.
Four months after that, Intel agreed to buy McAfee for $48 a share, $7.68 billion in total. The marriage lasted until 2017, when Intel sold a majority stake to TPG and kept 49%. McAfee returned to the NASDAQ in October 2020, raising $740 million at a valuation of about $8.6 billion, sold its enterprise arm in 2021 to concentrate on consumers, and was taken private again in 2022 by a group led by Advent International.
Its biggest early purchase was Dr Solomon's, the leading European antivirus maker, for $642 million in stock in 1998. Based in San Jose, it now sells protection for identity, privacy and devices, recently adding tools to spot deepfakes and AI-assisted scams.
Source: McAfee
