In the early hours of August 19, a superyacht owned by the wife of Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur who just months ago was cleared in a massive fraud case in the United States, was struck by a form of tornado off the northern coast of Sicily and capsized. On August 22, Mr. Lynch was confirmed to be among five bodies recovered from the wrecked yacht; rescue teams continued to search for victims, including a missing woman. It was a tragic end to an extraordinary story. One he could not have anticipated, a specialist in Bayes’ theorem, an 18th-century formula that states that with a good understanding of probability, most outcomes are predictable.
Mike Lynch’s yacht, a tribute to his company Autonomy
Bayesian thinking was at the heart and core of Mike Lynch’s astonishing rise. It was the subject of his Cambridge thesis and the basis of Autonomy, the software company he founded in 1996 and sold to Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $11.7 billion in 2011, netting him $800 million. Lynch named his now-submerged yacht Bayesian.
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Mike Lynch’s years-long legal battle, sparked by the sale of Autonomy, is considered one of Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud cases. The “British Bill Gates” was accused by HP of using “serious accounting irregularities” to inflate Autonomy’s value, and Lynch was detained and extradited to America on a chain. Facing 15 counts of fraud and conspiracy, he was put under house arrest in San Francisco. HP, which wrote down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion in the year after its purchase, was finally broken up in 2015.
Mr. Lynch’s chances of success were enormous. Fewer than 1 percent of federal cases end in acquittal. The vast majority of defendants plead guilty in exchange for more lenient sentences. To make matters worse, Charles Breyer, the judge who was to hear Mr. Lynch’s case, had already imprisoned Sushovan Hussain, the former chief financial officer of the software company Autonomy. A British judge had also ruled in HP’s favor in a separate civil suit.
Who is Mike Lynch? A “controlling, dominant and intimidating boss”
His decision to take the stand was another gamble. Federal prosecutors have portrayed Mr. Lynch as a “controlling, domineering and intimidating boss.” He was, his lawyers admitted, a “tough guy.” But they insisted that he delegated most of the accounting and was the prototype “startup guy” who liked to invent things.
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Mike Lynch had defied the odds before. Born in London to a firefighter and a nurse, he spent his holidays working as a cleaner at his mother’s hospital. A gifted student, he won a scholarship to Bancroft’s, a private school in London, and went on to study natural sciences at Cambridge. There, he delved into adaptive pattern recognition, an early form of artificial intelligence (AI) that would later fuel Autonomy’s growth. Autonomy and Darktrace, a cybersecurity company he co-founded, were both headquartered in the borough.
Mike Lynch, the shipwreck of a free man
The entrepreneur has always maintained his innocence. “Software accounting is complex,” he said after his acquittal. He said his company’s registration methods were standard in the industry. Back in Britain, he was eager to get back to innovating and vowed to campaign against what he saw as unfair extradition laws between Britain and America. He told reporters he looked forward to his “second life” as a free man.
Mr Lynch celebrated his court victory on board Bayesian when the violent gust of wind hit. His guests included Chris Morvillo, the partner who led Mr. Lynch’s defense team at Clifford Chance, a law firm, and Jonathan Bloomer, a key witness in the trial and the chairman of the international arm of Morgan Stanley, a bank, are both considered among the bodies found and thus victims. That Mike Lynch’s life was also cut short is a final cruel twist.
