Software Millionaire John McAfee Launches Presidential Bid

Software millionaire John McAfee has been saying he wanted to find someone "smarter and more charismatic" than himself to back for the presidency, but has decided to launch his own independent campaign instead.

McAfee on Tuesday filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to enter the race, reports The Hill, and has launched a new website, to back his bid.

The website, though, doesn't specifically outline any of McAfee's platform plans, but according to the paperwork filed on Tuesday, McAfee will be "founding a new party yet to be announced."

Initially on Tuesday, McAfee told the tech site Wired that his advisors were pressuring him to run and he had "many thousands of emails" from people pushing him to run, but "it's not something I would just choose to do on my own."

The anti-virus software giant would not tell Wired who his advisors are, but said he believes the government is broken, and is concerned that leaders don't understand technology, pointing to several recent hacks as proof.

McAfee, who listed an Alabama address on his filing, has had a checkered past. In 2012 he fled his Belize home, reports The Guardian, after he was sought for questioning over a businessman's murder. He was not charged with the murder, but was held for a week in a Guatemalan jail before he was deported to the United States.

McAfee has since then been working on a networking tool that he says is "NSA proof," charged with stalking, and has made claims that "bad people are still after me."

He is most likely to center his campaign on technology, telling Wired that "it's clear that the leadership of our country is illiterate on the fundamental technology that supports everything in life for us now, that is cyberscience, our smartphones, our military hardware, our communications."

McAfee has sold his stake in his namesake company, telling The New York Times in 2009 that he had lost all but $4 million out of the $100 million fortune he'd amassed during the United States' financial crisis, but later denied that claim in other publications.

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