Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur who once ranked on the Forbes billionaire list and founded software company Autonomy that over the past decade has been mired in legal problems, is reportedly missing alongside five others after a yacht sank off the coast of Sicily Monday morning.
Lynch is reportedly missing after a yacht sank near the coast of Sicily. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
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Key Takeaways
- Lynch founded Autonomy, a company that developed software that could analyze large batches of data, in 1996 with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt, a company that grew to serve clients including the U.K. and U.S. governments, Shell and BMW.
- Autonomy sold to HP in 2011 for $11 billion—but HP announced an $8.8 billion writedown the following year after discovering “serious accounting improprieties” that artificially inflated the value of Autonomy, leading to civil and criminal charges filed against Lynch, who has consistently denied wrongdoing.
- The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into HP’s allegations in 2013, but closed the investigation in 2015 after finding insufficient evidence.
- Lynch was cleared on 15 charges by a San Francisco jury in June 2024, including one count of conspiracy and 14 counts of wire fraud, concluding a three-month trial in which Lynch, who had been extradited to the United States, argued he did not inflate Autonomy’s value.
- HP won a fraud case against Lynch in the U.K. in 2022 after a judge found that HP had “substantially” argued Autonomy had artificially inflated its value, with the company set to receive damages, though the payment is expected to be less than the $5 billion claimed by HP.
- At the height of his tech career, British media referred to Lynch as “Britain’s Bill Gates.”
News Peg
A luxury yacht carrying 22 people sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday morning. Fifteen people were rescued from the ship, while one was found dead and six more remain missing—including both Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, multiple news outlets reported.
Two Americans are among those missing, according to multiple reports. Eight of those rescued from the vessel are receiving treatment at a nearby hospital. The yacht sank after being hit by a tornado, according to the Italian coast guard.
Key Background
Lynch, an Irish-born entrepreneur raised in England, founded Autonomy using technology he had developed while a student at Cambridge University. Autonomy grew out of Cambridge Neurodynamics, a fingerprint recognition business Lynch had founded in 1991.
Before Lynch became the CEO of Autonomy, he completed a Ph.D. in signal processing and connectionist models at Cambridge. Lynch’s doctoral thesis is reportedly one of the most widely read research works in Cambridge’s library.
Lynch garnered a reputation as an uncompromising boss—which prosecutors used as an argument against him in his U.S. trial, with witnesses describing a piranha tank in the Autonomy office and office rooms named after James Bond villains, a film franchise Lynch was known to be a fan of. Lynch was given an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), a civilian honor for making significant contributions in a field of work, in 2006. In 2011, he was elected to former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s council for science and technology.
Tangent
Outside of Autonomy, Lynch is the founder of venture capital firm Invoke Capital, which he launched after the sale of Autonomy. With Invoke, Lynch invested the cybersecurity company Darktrace and the legal software startup Luminance.
Surprising Fact
Lynch made the Forbes billionaires list in 2014 and 2015 with an estimated net worth of $1 billion, but he fell off the list in 2016.
