The Aussie tech guru pardoned by Trump after Secret Service arrest

Chris Wade was arrested by the Secret Service, pardoned by Donald Trump and sued by Apple before coming home Wed 22 Jul 2026 at 6:07pm , updatedWed 22 Jul 2026 at 6:10pm Chris Wade has been unsuccessfully sued by Apple, arrested by the Secret Service and summoned to the White House to troubleshoot with Elon Musk and Donald Trump. He is probably the most successful Australian entrepreneur you've never heard of, and is certainly the only Australian tech executive to be pardoned by the current US president. Despite decades spent in the US that took him from convicted hacker to the White House he is back in his hometown of Murwillumbah on the NSW north coast. Last year, the cyber security startup Mr Wade co-founded, Corellium, was bought by tech firm Cellebrite for $285 million. Soon after the sale of his business, one company executive called him to ask him which supercar he bought. He responded: "I didn't buy a supercar, I bought a pub". Wade paid $17.8 million for Murwillumbah's Riverview Hotel in December last year. His American colleague was stunned. "He said, 'Only an Australian would buy a pub instead of a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or something',"Wade said. "But I tell you what, I get way more value out of the pub, and it gives back a lot more. I get to meet a lot of new people and I get to share in experiences." Wade's current project is teaching a three-tonne welding robot to shake a cocktail, that passion for tech started when he was a child, when his father Peter says Chris was always tinkering with electronics. "We used to go to the local dump and he'd bring home all the electronic stuff he could find," Peter Wade said. "This is when he was four or five and he'd pull it all apart and make things work and play around with stuff. And he was into high voltage before he was even 10. That's what worried me — but yeah, he managed to survive." Having learned to code on a Commodore 64, by the time Wade was a teenager he was assembling computers, selling them to friends and teachers. Spams, scams and the Secret Service At age 21, in the he early 2000s, Wade moved to the United States, where he got himself into trouble while awaiting his working visa. "A guy that I knew approached me and said, 'Could you write a piece of software that allows me to proxy through other computers?' I said, 'Yeah, easy. No problems. A couple of thousand dollars, I'll do it.' And he took the software and plugged it into a spamming engine." The spams promoted financial scams, and because the emails crossed state borders, they were investigated by a federal authority — the US Secret Service. In 2005, armed agents raided Wade's home in Dallas, Texas. Wade was arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and charged with federal crimes. Foreign citizens convicted of crimes in the US are usually deported once they have served their sentence. But the authorities realised that Wade was no hardened criminal, and had some very useful skills. He was given a choice. "I could help them with cases that they struggled with, where they didn't have the technical know-how to solve the cases, and in exchange, my time would be cut down," Wade said. He was fined approximately US$70,000 ($99,800) and sentenced to two years' probation. Cracking passwords for the FBI In that time he began working with Chris Tarbell, an FBI Special Agent who specialised in cyber crimes. "When I first met Chris, man, I under-utilised him," Tarbell told 7.30. "I didn't realise how smart he was. "If some technical question came up in some sort of strange investigation, he would be my go-to. I'd ask him, and everything I'd ask him to do seemed kind of stupid to him." Wade worked with authorities for more than 10 years and helped on some of Tarbell's biggest cases, including investigations into the Silk Road drugs marketplace and the Anonymous hacking group. "I would do my piece of it," Wade said. "Which was to solve a puzzle or understand the data that they couldn't figure out ... or crack some passwords or things like that." In return, Wade got to stay in the US. He developed software which allowed app developers to emulate Androids and iPhones inside a computer. His startup, Corellium, was feted by software engineers but targeted by Apple, which sued Corellium for infringing its copyright in 2019. Despite his business success and work with the FBI, Wade's felony convictions remained a problem when his probation finished. He would be questioned, extensively, every time he entered or left the United States. "It certainly made it uncomfortable to travel internationally," Wade said. "It always weighed on me knowing that at some point the immigration and customs could show up at my door and escort me to the border and put me on a plane and I'd never be allowed to come back to the US, which is where my business was." A sick fish and a Marvel-lous pardon One way around the problem would be executive clemency — a presidential pardon. "You need a sponsor, someone to advocate for you. And that could be a senator, someone famous, one of the Kardashians. And I didn't have anyone," Wade told 7.30. That was until Gemmy, Wade's tropical Gem Tang, fell ill. Wade collected coral and saltwater fish. "I got really into it," he said. "I think at one point I had nine or 10 fish tanks in the house and eventually I reduced that to one big one." A specialist went to his Florida home to treat Gemmy. "The fish doctor came over and saw all the fish tanks I had and said, 'There's only one other person in the world that I know that's as crazy about fish as you are,' and he introduced us, and that was 'Ike'," Wade said. 'Ike' turned out to be Isaac Perlmutter, the publicity-shy chairman of Marvel Entertainment. The pair met outside Miami Seaquarium. At the time, neither man had any idea what the other did for a living. "We hit it off," Wade said. After their first lunch, Perlmutter came back into the restaurant and said his car was showing a flat tyre alert. "It was pouring rain outside … I remember going out and getting a tyre pump out of the back of my car and standing in the rain pumping his tyre up. And I think from that point on, he would always be there if I needed it," Wade said. The pair became friends and Perlmutter, a member of Trump's Mar-a-Lago club advised Wade to seek a presidential pardon. "Ike definitely put in a word for me,"Wade said. "And I think they looked at my file. Others like Chris Tarbell … they wrote letters for me. And I think that made an impact." Tarbell confirmed his contribution. "I more than happily wrote a letter to President Trump telling him how great Chris had been," the former FBI agent told 7.30. 'World's greatest hacker' and Elon Musk Perlmutter soon invited Wade to Mar-a-Lago. Eventually, Wade met Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and even Donald Trump himself. Trump, in turn, introduced Wade to Elon Musk as "the world's greatest hacker". Musk called Wade after the meeting, beginning a relationship that is still in place today. Wade says he has been called to the White House for late-night meetings with Musk. "It's just like anything, he runs into issues and he has a lot of smart people … and sometimes they bring me in on things to help,"Wade said. In December 2020, Kushner called Wade with some good news. The Australian had been granted a presidential pardon. "I'd met maybe once in passing to shake their hand or something, both Ivanka and Jared, but I'd never spent any time with them," Wade said. "It always struck me how amazing it was that Jared took an interest because I have no value to him, but they treated me unbelievably and I really appreciate that they did that for me because it changed my life." In December 2020, the same week he received the pardon, there were two more pieces of good news. Forbes magazine said Wade's company Corellium had created the cybersecurity product of the year; then a US court dismissed Apple's lawsuit against the company. The president's man Since then, Wade has become a US citizen, and continues to help both Musk and Trump. "[Donald Trump] has called me before, but normally there's a PA, or someone will call me, or Ike will call me and say, 'I just talked to the president. He needs your help with this'," he said. He says the White House is on his list of allowed callers, "so that they wake me up even if I have do not disturb on," he told 7.30. "I always told the president that he literally saved my life and if there was anything I could ever do to help ... I would show up and help him out." As part of the sale of his business, Wade was required to stay on to work for the parent company Cellebrite, something he wanted to do. "I believe in the company ... and I wanted to make sure they didn't screw up my technology," Wade said. Cellebrite is one of the world's biggest "mobile forensics" companies, with over 1,000 employees. Its products are used by law enforcement in both the US and Australia to unlock and extract information from suspects' devices, once court approval has been granted. "Cell phones have become like the storage locker of our lives," Wade said. "So ... if you have criminal investigations and you can't get into the phones, it hinders them immensely." The technology is used to unlock phones on major investigations, like the attempted assassination of Trump. "The FBI and Secret Service will bring the phone in and they will plug it into a Cellebrite machine, which will extract all the data from the phone and it unlocks the phone as well if there's a password on it so that they can do the criminal investigation," Wade explained. As Cellebrite's chief technology officer, Wade is focused on the tech staying ahead of criminals. "I'm heavily focused on what's next. How do we stay ahead of the criminals? How do we get better at solving cases?" Wade said. "So my focus is on the next three to five years of where a criminal's going, what technologies they're using, how do we keep up with them, and how do we take all that information and give it to AI in such a way that cold cases can be solved or even new cases are solved faster." And while International time zones make his working day quite tricky he is still making time for the pub and his hobbies. "I work from 10 o'clock at night until five o'clock in the morning. And then, not every day, but some days, I'll be at the pub from about 9am til about 3pm. "I do sleep in there a little bit, which leaves some time for robots and trains." Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV