Yep that was strange. Even went to their website trying to understand what was going on. The only thing that I have understood for sure that there are problems inside their development team nothing more.
Verge (XVG) pump is so popular, this is the power of Mcafee in the cryptocurrency, it was indeed only pumped from the word that Mcafee did but there's many speculations that the statement was paid for the people to have a panic buying on the verge for the coin to pump. But still, it is nice a remarkable tweet that everyone dives into it.
I don't know McAfee is working commonly with bitcoin whales, but his effect on the pump is not inetitable. He really affected the trading decission of lots of people after his tweets about Verge project.