Last Updated on July 25, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
In October 2024, Jay Dyer appeared on a podcast called Attwood Unleashed, in episode 178. He made some serious allegations tying Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, and potentially even Sean Combs, back to the dotcom boom. Perhaps back to the very beginning of the dotcom boom. But some of his statements are problematic.
His statement that got people asking me questions was his statement that Maxwell’s sister was involved in creating Netscape Navigator, an early web browser. The Maxwells had no involvement in Netscape, although the oligarch Marc Andreesen, another undesirable, did.
I think he crossed some wires or misspoke. It wasn’t clear from his statements that he had a good understanding of what Netscape Navigator was. Navigator is the direct ancestor of Firefox. He even missed the detail that Maxwell has two sisters who were involved in technology companies in the 90s.
The Maxwell sisters’ dotcom business
Twin sisters Isabel and Christine Maxwell were involved in the creation of Magellan, an early search engine. Today, one might confuse the difference between a web browser and a search engine since Google is the dominant search engine and Google Chrome is the dominant web browser. But during the time period Dyer was talking about, they weren’t the same, and that difference is important in the historical context.
When the Internet started becoming popular in 1993, the Maxwells ran a data brokerage company called Research on Demand. But that was a niche product. The big money is in reaching the masses. So they shifted to a product called McKinley. McKinley was a web portal, a collection of links. Today the value of a page that just collects links to other pages seems a bit strange, but it gave a phone book-like experience. It was a metaphor that people understood in the 90s. The dominant web portal was Yahoo. McKinley’s differentiator was that it had a ratings system. To put it in modern terms, think of Reddit without the discussions.
But McKinley wasn’t all that successful, so the company pivoted to another model. They built an early search engine and named it Magellan that launched in September 1995. Magellan had partnership deals in place with Microsoft, IBM, and AT&T, but they weren’t able to conduct an Initial Public Offering before they started running out of money. Christine Maxwell left, as did Isabel Maxwell’s husband David Hayden. Isabel Maxwell sold Magellan to Excite for $18 million in stock. Dyer got that detail wrong too, saying Microsoft bought it.
Magellan failed because it wasn’t as good as Webcrawler or Excite. Even if it had been, Altavista would have steamrolled it.
The flimsy Maxwell hypothesis
Dyer’s argument is that people like Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs protect themselves by gathering kompromat on powerful individuals, so the stakes become too high to take them down.
That’s reasonable. But I think that Dyer is connecting things that aren’t necessarily related. He said Maxwell had access to tools that came from the spy world, useful for storing and relating kompromat.
And we don’t know that. We know her sisters ran an information brokerage company in the early 1990s. But the company changed models three times in two years and was out of business by 1996. And just because the three sisters share the same last name, we don’t necessarily know that they were supplying technology to Maxwell, a socialite who maintained a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
In fact, I think the way things turned out suggests the opposite. If Jeffrey Epstein was really relying on technology from Maxwell’s sisters, why would he let them sell it to someone for $18 million in stock rather than buying it himself or arranging financing for it to continue? The whole reason they sold out was because they were out of money and couldn’t arrange for financing or an IPO.
Why I quit listening once Dyer was done talking about dotcoms
Jay Dyer said plenty of other things on the podcast, and I don’t have the background to confirm or refute the rest of it. But on this specific bit, I have a fair bit of knowledge and even first-hand experience with these products. I noticed he was talking off the top of his head, slipped on some key details, and gave some speculation without citing any sources. That makes it easy for him to jump to mistaken conclusions based on relationships that weren’t there.
And I just don’t see any connection between McKinley or Magellan and the work Maxwell did for Jeffrey Epstein, let alone anything Sean Combs may or may not have been doing. This was her twin sisters trying to get in on the dotcom boom early. It didn’t work, and they went their separate ways, trying other things. But it’s understandable why they tried, given that a company like Internet America doubled in value one day for no reason. It was an era of easy money, and you stood to make a lot if you could convince a few investors you might be the next Microsoft, so of course they’d try to get in on it.
And even though Sean Combs is accused of doing similar things to what Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of, and using similar methodologies, that doesn’t mean they conspired together. It’s possible they did. But at the time I’m writing this, Combs hasn’t gone to trial, so we don’t really know what he did or didn’t do.
Jumping to conclusions that aren’t there
I agree that it’s suspicious, and at least somewhat interesting, that Maxwell’s sisters ran a data brokerage business in the early 1990s. But that’s the thing about socialites. They have connections. Lots of connections. And they use those connections to benefit themselves and anyone they may know who needs a favor. But they aren’t necessarily using those connections in the most obvious ways. They’re probably using them in less obvious ways.
It’s more likely that Maxwell used her sisters’ activity to relate to other people she met, to get them to like her and keep talking to her. It’s a common tactic.
And let’s be real. Maxwell did reprehensible things. Jeffrey Epstein did reprehensible things, and Maxwell was one of his enablers. Sean Combs is accused of reprehensible things. But when we go and build up huge conspiracies around them, and relate things to them that aren’t related, we diminish the things that they did. We’re probably playing right into the psyops they used to protect themselves.
Conspiracies are rarer than we think. And when conspiracies do exist, such as Epstein’s conspiracy, drawing in unrelated things protects them. It makes it easy to make the argument about those unrelated things. And when you don’t have the details right, like the difference between a web browser and a search engine, it makes their defense much easier.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.