Chema Alonso: IT guru or smoke seller?

There are no lukewarm opinions about José María Alonso Cebrián—better known as Chema Alonso—he's either considered a computer guru or a mere charlatan. His casual style of dress— worn jeans, loose-fitting T-shirts with band prints, and his ever-present wool cap hiding his gray hair —have contributed to his image as an alternative nerd and tech icon. It's no coincidence that he defines himself on his LinkedIn profile as a "hacker" and "entrepreneur." He's proud of the term "hacker." So much so that he launched a petition campaign to have the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), which had originally defined the term as "computer pirate," add the meaning of "a person with great skills in computer use who investigates a computer system to report errors and develop improvement techniques."

Born in 1975, he has always boasted of being "the boy from Móstoles," the city in Madrid where he studied and grew up in a humble family. Since then, he showed promise with his passion for computers, teaching at a high school while still a minor. A computer engineer with a PhD from the Rey Juan Carlos University and a technical computer systems engineer from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, after working at several companies, he founded Informática 64, an IT security and consulting company that would definitively change the course of his professional life.

And in 2013, Telefónica purchased Informática 64. Chema not only immediately profited (industry sources report that the operator paid him between 10 and 15 million euros), but also joined the multinational where his career would definitively take off. Under the protective wing of José María Álvarez-Pallete, president of Telefónica from 2016 to 2025, Alonso's meteoric rise in the company paralleled his media exposure. Conferences, meetings in Silicon Valley with the heads of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, television appearances to explain the dangers of cybercrime, and star appearances at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

"The hacker with the hat," as he was known, was the new face of a company that wanted to shed its aging image as a former state-owned telephone monopoly and become a leader in new technologies. This wasn't just a marketing ploy, as Alonso began to accumulate executive positions and responsibilities that came with budgets of hundreds of millions of euros: Chief Data Officer (CDO), Chief Digital Consumer Officer (CDCO), president of Wayra, member of the executive committee of Telefónica...

And Aura arrives

The computer engineer wasn't daunted by such prominence; on the contrary, he fostered it. Between 2016 and 2017, he presented a project called Aura, renamed the Fourth Platform and finally known as Kemel, which promised to give users back control of their data, which had been in the hands of the evil Google or Facebook, and even monetize it as if it were a YouTube video. In reality, this is the explanation Pallete gave for the project because Chema never knew how to specify, either externally or internally, "what the heck this Fourth Dimension was," as some long-time Telefónica executive, with little sympathy for the man from Móstoles, would sarcastically say. The computer engineer used almost scholastic language when he spoke of Aura as "a way to break with the standardization of telecommunications services and generate a more direct and personalized relationship with the customer." But scholasticism, even if technological and riddled with Anglicisms, sits poorly with the business. And the Fourth Platform/Aura/Kemel was a complete failure, to the point that it was discontinued by the new leaders of Telefónica Tech following the arrival of Marc Murtra as president of Telefónica at the beginning of this year.

After the flop, and with his feet more on the ground, the hacker spearheaded another mega-launch in 2018. Movistar Home, sold as a kind of Alexa for controlling all kinds of devices, but in reality nothing more than a supposedly smart remote control. It cost 79 euros and didn't even work in the presentations Alonso himself gave about the invention. In 2023, Telefónica stopped selling it and, according to its own executives, it was stockpiled in a warehouse in District C, the company's headquarters.

By then, Alonso's standing within the company was already plummeting. The trigger came on May 12, 2017, when WannaCry hit , a global cyberattack that used ransomware to hijack computers and demand a multi-million-dollar ransom to release them. Companies such as Iberdrola, Gas Natural, and Telefónica itself ordered their equipment shut down and sent their staff home. The reaction from Alonso, the operator's top cybersecurity officer, was a dodge-the-ball tweet: "As many of you know, Telefónica's internal security is not one of my direct responsibilities. But we are all part of security..." The message was considered insulting within the company and ended up earning him the animosity of most of his team, to the point that Alonso had to send an internal email to employees apologizing.

Exit from Telefónica

Since that episode, Alonso has reduced his media exposure, although he continued to manage multimillion-dollar funds. His salary was also high, allowing him to move to the exclusive La Finca residential area in Pozuelo de Alarcón, where he lives with other illustrious friends of his, such as goalkeeper Iker Casillas. Murtra's replacement of Álvarez-Pallete as president of Telefónica has ended his career at the company, from which he has received a substantial severance package.

His departure from Telefónica last March (he left executive positions but remained a board member) has also sparked controversy. Last Tuesday, Alonso announced his appointment as vice president and head of international development at Cloudflare. This is an American technology company specializing in cybersecurity and cloud computing that serves as an online intermediary for websites and content providers, and which LaLiga accuses of being responsible for protecting 50% of websites that broadcast football through pirated means. Just two weeks earlier, Alonso was appointed advisor to the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), not long ago a declared enemy of LaLiga, with which he maintains all kinds of disputes over schedules, referee appointments, the Super Cup, etc.

The conflict has reached such a magnitude that the hacker has had no choice but to resign as a referee advisor . Nor must they be very happy at Telefónica that the person responsible for their cybersecurity since 2016 now works at Cloudflare, a firm accused of hosting the websites that pirate matches, for whose rights Movistar+ has paid hundreds of millions of euros. Because although Alonso is no longer on staff, until July he was listed as a member of Telefónica's Cybersecurity Council and an advisor to Telefónica Tech. The fox guarding the henhouse.