Mike Lynch, a man once called ‘British Bill Gates’, dies at the age of 59

LONDON – British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59 years old.

Just two months ago, Lynch won a stunning victory in a landmark US trial of allegations of Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to the US technology giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.

Fears for Lynch’s life swirled earlier this week when he was reported missing following the sinking of a yacht – later confirmed to be owned by his wife, Angela Bacares – off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the province of Palermo. in Italy.

Bacares was one of 15 people rescued after the yacht collapsed earlier this week.

The anchored ship, a 56-meter sailing yacht called the Bayesian, was hit by a violent storm early Monday morning.

Witnesses told local media that the boat, which had 10 crew members and 12 passengers on board, sank rapidly after the mast broke.

Lynch’s body was recovered from the wreckage of the yacht on Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC on Thursday. His daughter, Hannah, is still missing according to the source, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the situation. Sky News reported this earlier the news.

Lynch was born in 1965 in Ilford, a large town in East London, to Irish parents and grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father a firefighter.

Lynch had a modest upbringing, but at the age of 11 he was given a scholarship to attend Bancroft’s School, a private school in Woodford Green, east London.

From Bancroft he went to Cambridge University, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas such as electronics, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signal processing and communications.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd. on, a company that produced designs and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition company called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted South Yorkshire Police among its clients.

But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company grew into one of Britain’s largest technology companies.

Autonomy’s software, which consists of pattern-matching algorithms, was touted as a solution that could help workers abstract meaning from unstructured data, including web pages, email, video, audio and text.

These pattern recognition techniques were based on so-called Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference named after a theorem developed by the 18th century statistician Thomas Bayes.

Lynch’s luxury yacht, the Bayesian, is named after this mathematical model.

After selling his company to HP, Lynch became known as “Britain’s Bill Gates” by the British national media, serving as a rare example of a British businessman who successfully built and scaled a globally significant technology company that spanned several markets around the world. sold worldwide.

However, Lynch’s reputation would take a hit after the HP deal took a turn for the worse. In 2012, HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy – just a year after purchasing it.

Lynch quickly became the target of a protracted legal battle with the US tech giant, with HP suing Lynch for $5 billion in damages over allegations that Lynch inflated Autonomy’s revenue by around $700 million.

Lynch, who had long denied the allegations, was extradited from Britain to the US in 2023 to face trial over the HP allegations.

This happened despite pressure from Lynch’s supporters on the British government not to allow his extradition.

U.S. prosecutors had filed criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy for an alleged scheme to inflate Autonomy’s revenues starting in 2009, in part to entice a buyer.

However, after a stunning victory in June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges after the trial. The process took three months.

During the course of the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense. He denied wrongdoing and told jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.

Prosecutors had alleged that Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased chief financial officer Stephen Chamberlain, who also died in a tragic car accident on Saturday, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.

These included outdated agreements, concealing the company’s loss-making operations by reselling hardware, and intimidating or paying off individuals who raised concerns.

However, Lynch told jurors that at Autonomy he had focused on technology-related matters, not finance.

Accounting and financial decisions were left to Autonomy’s then chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, he said.

Hussain was separately convicted in the US in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, bank fraud and securities fraud in connection with the HP deal. He was released in January after serving a five-year prison sentence.

In addition to founding Autonomy, Lynch also leads Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups. In 2012 he founded Invoke.

He became a leading voice in support of the UK technology industry, backing key names such as cyber security companies Dark trail and legal technology company Luminance.

Listed Darktrace, which had rejected similar accusations of inflating its earnings by US short seller Quintessential Capital Management, earlier this year agreed to a deal to be bought out and delisted by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo for 5 $.32 billion in cash.

Lynch previously served on the board of the British broadcaster BBC and was also once an advisor to the British government at the Council for Science and Technology.

In 2014 and 2015 he made the Forbes’ Billionaires Listwith an estimated net worth of $1 billion. However, even though he faced legal fees over his dispute with HP, he delisted from that list in 2016.

Aside from the legal battles, Lynch had several hobbies to keep him busy, including raising and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in 2016 interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the Middle Ages, and none of them have any Apple products.”

Prior to his death, Lynch had reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in eastern England, to recover from his American legal battle, the local This was reported by the East Anglian Times newspaper.

Just weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper that he feared dying in prison if found guilty of HP’s charges.

“If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch told the newspaper. interview with De Tijd.

“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is: what do you want to do with it?” he added.