Mike Lynch, once called ‘Britain’s Bill Gates’, dies at 59

LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch was found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59.

Just two months ago, Lynch won a stunning victory in a landmark trial in a U.S. court over charges that: Hewlett Packard He said he artificially inflated the company’s value when he sold his company, Autonomy, to a U.S. tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.

Fears for Lynch’s life grew earlier this week when he was reported missing after his yacht sank off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the Palermo region of Italy. It was later confirmed to belong to his wife, Angela Vacares.

Bakares was one of 15 people rescued after their yacht capsized earlier this week.

The 56-metre (184-foot) sailing yacht Bayesian, which was anchored, was hit by a violent storm early Monday morning.

Witnesses told local media that the boat, with 10 crew members and 12 passengers on board, nosedived after its 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, the source said, asking not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the situation. Sky News previously reported the story.

Born in 1965 in Ilford, a large city in east London, to Irish parents, Lynch grew up near Chelmsford, Essex, England. His mother was a nurse and his father was a firefighter.

Lynch grew up in a poor family, but at the age of 11 he was awarded a scholarship to the Bancroft School, a private school in Woodford Green, east London.

After graduating from Bancroft, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, focusing particularly on areas including electrical engineering, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch earned his PhD in signal processing and communications.

In the late 1980s, Lynett founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a company that designs and manufactures audio products for the music industry.

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

But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt, which grew into one of the UK’s biggest technology companies.

Autonomy’s software, built on pattern-matching algorithms, is pitched as a solution that helps workers abstract meaning from unstructured data like web pages, emails, video, audio and text.

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

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

Lynch became known in the British national press as “the British Bill Gates” after his company was sold to HP, and was hailed as a rare example of a British businessman who successfully built and scaled a globally significant technology company across diverse markets.

But Lynch’s reputation took a hit as the HP deal deteriorated. In 2012, HP reduced Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion, just a year after the acquisition.

Lynch soon became the target of a long-running legal battle with the U.S. tech giant, with HP suing Lynch for $5 billion, accusing him of inflating Autonomy’s revenue by about $700 million.

Lynch, who has long denied the allegations, was extradited from Britain to the United States in 2023 to stand trial on the HP charges.

The decision came despite pressure from Lynch’s supporters on the British government not to allow his extradition.

U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly plotting to inflate Autonomy’s earnings starting in 2009, in part to lure buyers.

But in a stunning victory in June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges after a trial that lasted three months.

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

Prosecutors alleged that Lynch and Autonomy’s chief financial officer, Stephen Chamberlain, who died in a tragic car accident Saturday, inflated Autonomy’s finances in several ways.

This included reneging on past contracts, reselling hardware to cover up the company’s loss-making operations, and threatening or paying off people who raised concerns.

But Lynch told jurors he focused on technology-related issues, not Autonomy’s finances.

He said accounting and financial decisions were left to Sushoban Hussain, then Autonomy’s chief financial officer.

Hussein was separately convicted in the United States in 2018 of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud in connection with the HP deal. He was sentenced to five years in prison and released from prison in January.

Along with founding Autonomy, Lynch also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm that supports European technology startups. He founded Invoke in 2012.

He has become a key spokesperson for the UK tech industry, backing major names such as cybersecurity firms. darktrace There’s also Luminance, a legal technology company.

Darktrace, a publicly traded company that had fended off similar allegations that U.S. short-seller Quintessential Capital Management inflated its revenues, agreed earlier this year to a deal that would see U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo pay $5.32 billion in cash to buy the company and take it private.

Lynch previously sat on the board of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and at one point served as an adviser to the British government on its Science and Technology Committee.

In 2014 and 2015, he was included on Forbes’ list of billionaires, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. However, he was removed from the list in 2016 due to legal costs stemming from a dispute with HP.

Aside from his legal troubles, Lynch kept busy with several hobbies, including raising and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

“I raise rare breeds,” Lynch said in a 2016 LeadersIn interview. “I raise cattle that were extinct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has raised since the Middle Ages, and none of them have any Apple products.”

According to local newspaper the East Anglian Times, Lynch was believed to have returned to his farm in Suffolk, eastern England, before his death to recover from his legal battles in the United States.

Lynch told the Times newspaper weeks before she was reported missing that she feared she would die in prison if convicted of the HP charges.

“If this had gone the wrong way, my life as I knew it would have been over,” Lynch told the Times.

“It’s strange, but now I have a second life. The question is how do I want to live it?” he added.