British entrepreneur Mike Lynch leaves the High Court in London, on March 25, 2019.Henry Nicholls/Reuters
Mike Lynch, a British billionaire and tech entrepreneur, was confirmed deceased after his body was retrieved from the wreck of his family yacht that sank earlier this week off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm, a source close to the rescue operation said.
Mr. Lynch had been one of six people missing after the superyacht Bayesian was struck by the storm. The bodies of five other people who vanished when the boat went down were recovered, including the body of the final missing person who is believed to be Mr. Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah.
Once hailed as Britain’s king of technology, Mr. Lynch was called Britain’s first internet billionaire in a report published in 2001 by The Globe and Mail.
Lynch, 59, most recently made headlines in early 2024 for a fraud trial in the U.S., for allegations surrounding the sale of his company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
Co-founder of Britain’s first global tech company
Mr. Lynch co-founded Autonomy Corp. in 1996, using research he had developed while pursuing doctoral studies in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He applied the statistical concept of Bayesian inference to machine learning and artificial intelligence models, turning his study into software that can find data patterns, enabling searches to be done with only fragments of information.
Mr. Lynch’s luxury superyacht involved in Monday’s crash was named after the Bayesian method of statistical inference.
Mike Lynch sold Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard in 2011 for US$11-billion in a deal that was hailed as a critical step in the computer giant’s reinvention.
The logo for The Hewlett-Packard Company displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on June 27, 2018.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
But within a year, HP announced an $8.8-billion writedown on the purchase, and called in regulators in the United States and Britain to conduct a criminal investigation, alleging Mr. Lynch engaged in a multibillion-dollar fraud to inflate the value of his company.
Decade-long legal battle between HP and Mr. Lynch
By 2015, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office had closed its investigation into the deal, not finding enough evidence to prove impropriety on Mr. Lynch’s part.
In 2023, Mr. Lynch was extradited to the U.S., to face criminal charges in the decade-long legal battle. After an 11-week criminal trial that delved into the history of HP’s acquisition of Autonomy, a federal court jury in San Francisco acquitted him on all 15 felony counts in June, 2024.
Mr. Lynch walks into federal court in San Francisco on March 26.Michael Liedtke/The Associated Press
The acquittal vindicated Mr. Lynch, who spent years fiercely denying he did anything wrong, while painting HP as a technological train wreck. It was yet another setback for HP, which had spent years blaming Mr. Lynch for duping the company into a deal that deepened its troubles and stained a legacy dating back to the company’s 1939 inception in a Silicon Valley garage.
The missing yacht in southern Italy
The 56-metre-long (184 ft) sailboat sank with 22 people on board shortly before sunrise, the coast guard said in a statement.
The missing people were of British, American and Canadian nationality, the coast guard said. As of latest reports, 15 people, including a one-year-old child, were rescued.
Search resumes for Mike Lynch, other passengers of superyacht that sank off coast of Sicily
“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude,” a coast guard official in Palermo told Reuters.
Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in recent days – with floods and landslides causing major damage in the north of the country – after weeks of scorching heat.
With reports from Paul Waldie, The Associated Press and Reuters