British software tycoon Mike Lynch, 59, died when the superyacht he was on sank off the coast of Sicily, where he had been celebrating his acquittal on fraud charges by a US jury a few weeks earlier.
Lynch, his teenage daughter Hannah and four other passengers — including Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer (formerly of Lynch’s Autonomy) and Lynch’s lawyer Chris Morvillo, a partner at Clifford Chance — were reported missing when the yacht sank. After a three-day search, the Italian coast guard apparently confirmed that Lynch died in the crash. Lynch’s daughter has still not been found, but the bodies of the other passengers have reportedly been identified.
Lynch was survived by one daughter and his wife, Angela Bacares, who was one of 15 people on board Bayesian who were rescued by the emergency services.
The entrepreneur was initially reported missing after Bayesian—180-foot luxury ship apparently registered to his wife’s business — was buffeted by a violent wind storm early in the morning. The storm, a type of marine tornado known as a waterspout, is it was reported that the yacht’s mast had overturnedcausing the boat to capsize and sink.
The yacht’s name is believed to be a tribute to the Reverend Thomas Bayes, a man who set out in the 1700s to prove the existence of God using mathematics. Bayes’ work helped Lynch build his fortune: his theorem was the basis for Autonomy’s ability to analyze enormous data sets. Autonomy, the software company Lynch co-founded in 1996, became one of the UK’s most successful tech exports in a period dominated by Silicon Valley. In a 2015 interview with WIRED, Lynch said that Bayes “will probably be to the information age what Einstein was to physics.”
Lynch was born in Ireland in 1965 but raised in Essex, England. He studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he later earned a doctorate in mathematical computation and became a research fellow.
Autonomy wasn’t Lynch’s only company took part in beginning. In the 1980s, he founded Lynett Systems, which supplied audio products to the music industry. In 1991, he founded Cambridge Neurodynamics, a fingerprint recognition company. In 2012, he founded Invoke Capital, a vehicle for investing in British technology companies, which later provided seed funding for the now publicly traded cybersecurity firm Darktrace.
In 2006, Lynch was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of his contribution to British enterprise, and in 2011 he became an adviser to the UK government on science and technology.
But the public’s perception of Lynch was shaped by the $11.7 billion sale of Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011, a deal that fell through shortly after it closed, and Lynch was accused of fraud.
During the year, HP had the purchase value was written off by $8.8 billionclaiming it uncovered “serious accounting irregularities” and “gross misstatements.” In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice filed 17 charges against Lynch based on those allegations. A superseding indictment listed a range of charges, including telecommunications fraud and conspiracy.