Tech tycoon Mike Lynch, whose luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, spent more than a decade building Britain’s biggest software company. For almost as long he has fought allegations that he had inflated its price in order to sell it for billions of pounds.
Lynch’s body was recovered on Thursday from the wreckage of Monday’s crash, a senior Italian official said.
Lynch founded Autonomy in 1996 based on his groundbreaking research at the University of Cambridge, and was lauded by shareholders, business leaders and politicians when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion 15 years later.
But in late 2012, HP stunned Wall Street and the City of London by saying it had discovered a massive accounting scandal. Lynch denied the allegations.
HP wrote off $8.8 billion in value, and a legal battle ensued for 12 years in courts from London to San Francisco.
Lynch was known for his extraordinary intelligence, turning his cutting-edge academic research into a multibillion-pound technology business and becoming known as Britain’s Bill Gates.
He has also not shied away from confronting critics of his company — including once Oracle’s Larry Ellison — and played a central role in his defense.
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He hired some of the biggest names in Britain’s legal and corporate communications professions, and invited some journalists into a room filled with neatly stacked piles of company documents to give them a peek into the company’s accounts.
Before the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence, HP was drawn to Autonomy’s ability to find and organize unstructured information for customers, a killer application in a world of unlimited data.
Lynch received approximately $800 million for his stake in Autonomy.
Pointing to Bayes’ theorem
Autonomy’s software used a patented algorithm based on a mathematical formula developed by the Reverend Thomas Bayes in the 18th century. In keeping with this formula, Lynch named his yacht, which sank off the coast of Italy, the Bayesian.
HP launched a $5 billion civil suit against Lynch in London’s High Court, with the entrepreneur sitting on the witness stand for 22 days, one of the longest cross-examinations in Britain.
The US firm largely won the case in 2022, when the judge found that Lynch and a colleague had fraudulently concealed a “fire sale” of hardware and engaged in complex reselling schemes to hide the lack of sales of Autonomy’s software, the business HP wanted. Damages in the civil case are yet to be decided.
Lynch was then extradited to the US to face criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy, where he could face decades in prison if convicted.
He testified in his own defense in San Francisco, denying any wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP had bungled the integration of its acquisitions.
“Autonomy was an extremely successful company,” he said.
In June, Lynch was acquitted of all charges and released after a year of house arrest. He said he was “ecstatic” and looking forward to returning to his family and his estate in Suffolk, England, where he has a herd of rare-breed cattle and several dogs.
As part of this celebration, Lynch invited people who had supported him to join his family on his 56 m (184 ft) yacht for a sailing holiday around southern Italy. Guests included his lawyer and a Morgan Stanley executive who attended as a character witness.
The boat was anchored and its sails down when a fierce storm hit it before dawn on Monday and it sank rapidly.
His wife survived, but his young daughter was still missing on Thursday, the last person still to be traced after four other bodies were recovered. The ship’s cook was also found dead a few hours after the accident.
UK Tech Champion
Lynch was born in 1965 and grew up in Chelmsford, near London. He said his parents, a nurse and a fireman, instilled in him the importance of education.
At the University of Cambridge he studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry and researched signal processing for his doctorate. According to local media reports, his thesis is still one of the most read thesis in the university library.
He founded Autonomy in 1996 and used some of the money from the sale to become a leader in the U.K. tech sector. His venture capital firm Invoke backed Darktrace, a British cybersecurity company that was to be sold to U.S. firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion, and other tech businesses.
“Mike’s ability to identify and solve complex problems was amazing, as was his ability to simplify and explain them,” family friend Patrick Jacob said in a statement distributed by a Lynch family spokesman.
“As a friend, Mike was never dull and was always ready for a lively debate on almost any topic with intelligence and affable enthusiasm. He could be challenging and direct, but I never left after meeting him without feeling that my life had been enriched by the experience.”
Lynch, a married father of two daughters, was keen to share his expertise.
He advised the government on science and innovation, was on the boards of the BBC and the British Library, and was a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.
After his acquittal he vowed to campaign against the extradition treaty between Britain and the United States, which British critics have long called one-sided, and told the BBC in August that he could not have been acquitted without funding for his defence.
“As a British citizen you shouldn’t need money to protect yourself,” he said.