British software tycoon Mike Lynch, 59, died after the superyacht he was on board sank off the coast of Sicily, where he was celebrating being acquitted of fraud by a US jury weeks earlier.
Lynch, her teenage daughter Hannah and four other passengers, including Morgan Stanley’s international chairman Jonathan Bloomer (formerly of Lynch’s firm 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 has Reportedly confirmed Lynch had died in the crash. Lynch’s daughter is still missing, but the bodies of the other passengers have been identified.
Lynch is survived by a daughter and his wife, Angela Bacares, who was among the 15 people aboard the Bayesian who were rescued by emergency services.
The businessman was initially reported missing after Bayesian—a 180-foot luxury vessel Reportedly registered to a company owned by his wife—was hit by a violent windstorm in the early hours. The storm, a type of marine tornado known as a waterspout, is It was reported that he knocked down the yacht’s mast.overturning the boat and causing it to sink.
The yacht’s name is thought to be a tribute to the Reverend Thomas Bayes, a man who in the 18th century set out to prove the existence of God through mathematics. Bayes’ work helped Lynch build his fortune – his theorem was the basis for Autonomy’s ability to analyse large data sets. Autonomy, a software company Lynch co-founded in 1996, would go on to become one of the UK’s most successful tech exports during a period dominated by Silicon Valley. In an interview with WIRED in 2015, Lynch said that Bayes would “probably turn out to be to the information age what Einstein was to physics.”
Lynch was born in Ireland in 1965, but grew up in the English county of Essex. He studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he later earned a PhD in mathematical computation and became a research associate.
Autonomy was far from the only Lynch company He had a hand in In the 1980s he founded Lynett Systems, which provided audio products to the music industry. In 1991 he founded Cambridge Neurodynamics, a company specialising in fingerprint recognition. In 2012 he founded Invoke Capital, a vehicle for investing in British technology companies which later provided seed funding to Darktrace, a now publicly traded cybersecurity company.
In 2006, Lynch was awarded an OBE in recognition of his contribution to British enterprise, and in 2011 he became an adviser to the UK government on matters relating to science and technology.
However, Lynch’s public perception would be defined by his $11.7 billion sale of Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011, a deal that fell apart shortly after completion and for which he was subsequently charged with fraud.
Within a year, HP had Reduced the value of the purchase by $8.8 billionclaiming that she had uncovered “serious accounting irregularities” and “egregious misrepresentations.” In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice filed 17 charges against Lynch based on those claims. The superseding indictment listed a variety of charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy.