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Where Are They Now - Sunday, April 22, 2007

Every Founder's Dream: Living Large Like John McAfee

The WSJ profiles the fun that John McAfee (McAfee Software) is having in his golden years. The 61-year-old McAfee apparently has a hot young girlfriend, and he does his best to look younger with pierced ears, and spiked hair with bleached blond tips and a goatee.

McAfee is looking to pocket more walking-around-money through the sale of his 280-acre Colorado estate, which will be auctioned on May 10th for an expected $20M. The land sports a 10K-square-foot mansion on a hillside. The home has all the normal mansion crap but also has three guest homes, two guest apartments and nine guest cabins for a total of 19 bedrooms. Plus it has four trout lakes.

These days, McAfee has become addicted to an ultra-light flight sport that they call aerotreking. From his home base in Rodeo, NM, McAfee and a band of "sky gypsies" take flight around the Southwest.

McAfee say: "Money does a really strange thing. It gives you this sense of omnipotence. But eventually you're just one person, you look around at all this stuff you've acquired and you wonder how you're ever going to use it."

No matter what he says it doesn't seem that McAfee's new sky gypsy life-style is spartan. He built a villa in the center of a chain of airstrips on his New Mexico property, he bought a fleet of trailers for himself and his crew (including a trailer once owned by Howard Hughes) as well as some vintage autos including a 1936 Boattail Speedster worth $400K, plus he's building a coffee shop and movie theater for the gang.

Read - McAfee's Mansion, Estate of the Day (Luxist)
Read - Come Fly With Me Under Desert Skies In Very High Style (WSJ)