At least two terrible ironies surround the death of Mike Lynch. One lies in the name of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of 19 August 2024. He had named the boat Bayesian to honour Bayes’s theorem, a mathematical rule that helps you weigh up the probability of something given the available evidence, which served as Lynch’s guiding light over the course of a tempestuous career. The theorem was “a beautiful key to our minds”, Lynch believed. But it was entirely incapable of predicting the outcome that morning, when the yacht capsized during a storm, killing seven people, including Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and his US lawyer, Chris Morvillo.
A second irony lies in the fact that Lynch had just come through the trial of his life, one he felt was bound to end in jail, where he thought he could die. Somehow, to everyone’s astonishment, an American jury had acquitted him and his co-defendant on all 15 counts of fraud.
As Katie Prescott sets it out in this excellent, meticulously researched biography, Lynch was a monstrous man in many ways, but a gifted one, and it is hard to begrudge him his initial success. Born in 1965 to a firefighter father and a nurse mother, he spent the first eight years of his life in Ilford, east London, a rough suburb in those days, where the family felt like outsiders because of their Irish background. He’d been born with an unusual physical trait, having no fingerprints. It was an obvious metaphor for his future acquittal. As he himself would joke: “I would make an excellent criminal!”
He was also blessed with brains, musical talent and drive. Aged 11, he won a scholarship to Bancroft’s, a private school in London’s Woodford Green, where he proved an excellent student. He was fascinated by mechanics and electronics, saving up to buy a BBC Micro and teaching himself how to program. He started his first company in his bedroom at the age of 16, with a school friend: Lynett Systems, as it was called, would produce a cheap but widely used music sampler called Lynex. Soon he was off to Cambridge, where he earned a PhD by using neural networks to find ways computers could learn to recognise speech, images and text. He continued to pursue his business ideas in parallel with his doctorate.
Lynch the student could be charming and good company, but the business world brought out an unscrupulous side. He was a fluent liar, able to make up credible stories on the spot, and would routinely exaggerate his company’s capabilities and experience. Business, he believed, was mostly a show: the trick was to make clients believe you could deliver the goods, then find out how to actually do that later. He was harsh with anyone who held him back, including people he owed money to. One of his first companies, Cambridge Neurodynamics, even had a fictional finance director, “Frank Bridges”, who was always out of the office when creditors came calling.
As a boss, Lynch was awful. One of his companies was “an archetype of workplace toxicity”, according to Prescott. An ex-staffer described the working environment as “horrible, horrible, horrible”. He was bullying and intolerant, and when things went wrong employees were assaulted by a barrage of shouting. He seems deliberately to have designed a sinister corporate culture. Visitors to one office found a circular tank of piranhas in reception, occasionally with a half-eaten fish flapping around on one fin. This, he would say, was where failing salespeople would get dunked. Meeting rooms here were named after Bond villains: Dr No, Goldfinger, Scaramanga.
Yet this hellish environment somehow produced results. One of Cambridge Neurodynamics’ early successes, ironically enough, was a fingerprint recognition system. Others included technology for reading car number plates, and optical character recognition software. In 1996, he launched Autonomy, the company for which he would become famous. It specialised in business search engines, based on Bayesian principles. Its core product was the data-processing package IDOL, something “like a box of Lego which could be adapted to customer needs”, according to Prescott. When it worked, it could be “awe-inspiring”, but sometimes it didn’t.
Autonomy floated on the London Stock Exchange in October 2000, with an astonishing valuation of £4.1bn. Lynch now had the money and recognition he craved. He would be invited on to a BBC board, he had a country pile in Suffolk, sponsored Tottenham Hotspur and counted peers and politicians among his friends. But with Autonomy’s status as a public company came financial scrutiny, and pressure to deliver results. Sales figures were released quarterly, and analysts and traders – “twits in suits”, as Lynch called them – would downgrade his stock or short it if sales didn’t live up to forecasts. The company started to get creative.
Prescott describes one technique for inflating sales using resellers. If a major software deal was in the pipeline but hadn’t come through by the quarterly deadline, Autonomy would call a friendly reseller at the last minute and ask them to make the purchase in lieu of the end client. This effectively meant they could register tomorrow’s jam in today’s accounts. But sometimes the deal didn’t land – the client never signed, tomorrow’s jam didn’t arrive – so Autonomy had to recompense the reseller in other, spurious ways.
These tactics might not have mattered so much had Hewlett-Packard not paid $11.7bn for Autonomy in 2011 – a terrible deal, in which the slow-moving, monolithic US tech giant ignored all the warning signs and the chatter among London analysts about Autonomy’s numbers. HP’s board quickly regretted the decision and appointed a new CEO, Meg Whitman, who wrote down the acquisition’s value by $8.8bn and launched a $5bn lawsuit against Lynch.
Immense legal battles followed, which would take years to reach a conclusion. In 2018, a San Francisco court convicted Autonomy’s chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain of serious fraud and sentenced him to five years in jail and a $10m fine. In 2022, a court in London found that Lynch and Hussain had acted fraudulently and subsequently judged that HP was owed hundreds of millions of dollars. Lynch was extradited in handcuffs to the US, where he was put on trial with Steve Chamberlain, Autonomy’s VP of Finance, in San Francisco. Lynch put their chances of winning at 0.4%. Both defendants were found not guilty on all counts. Lynch and his defence team were ecstatic about the verdict, Chris Morvillo writing on social media: “And they all lived happily ever after”. In fact they lived happily for just 73 more days.
To celebrate their win, Mike and his wife, Angela, decided to take the Bayesian on a series of cruises around southern Italy, inviting various supporters and associates. Lynch was no sailor, but he loved the seclusion the boat offered, and was immensely proud of its a 72-metre mast, one of the tallest in the world – a feature that some have speculated made it more vulnerable in strong winds, although the yacht’s manufacturer has defended its design. Through July and into August, it pottered around Capri and the Aeolian Islands. Then, in the middle of the month, the court victors were overtaken by a sequence of near-impossible coincidences, as Prescott sets out in pacily written detail.
On 17 August, Steve Chamberlain left his Cambridgeshire home for a long run and was hit by a car. He would die three days later, on 20 August. About 4am on 19 August, when the Bayesian was anchored off the Sicilian fishing village of Porticello, she was caught in a sudden thunderstorm. The skipper prepared to turn her into the wind, but a gust caught her and knocked her on her side. At a heel angle of just 42 degrees, she began to ship vast quantities of water. Moments later, she was gone.
• The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: The Improbable Life & Death of a Tech Billionaire by Katie Prescott is published by Macmillan Business (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
