Seven weeks ago I interviewed Mike Lynch. His words are eerily tragic (2024)

“I think Mike is gone.” They were the first words, through sobs and tears, that I heard on Monday morning. I had awoken, bleary-eyed, to a barrage of strange texts and emails — requests from other journalists to talk about Mike Lynch in light of the sinking of his superyacht, Bayesian, off the coast of Sicily.

It was disorienting. It didn’t make sense. Lynch was “missing”? I immediately called an adviser of his, who I had come to know over the previous months, to make sense of the nonsensical. Surely Lynch, who had just improbably won his freedom after a 12-year legal odyssey that threatened to put him in prison for the rest of his days, was fine? Surely, he was not on board the yacht that its maker had called “unsinkable” but had, somehow, sunk overnight? “Mike is gone,” came the reply, through sobbing.

In my 20-plus years of journalism, never have I encountered a story so cosmically eerie and tragic. Lynch died on Monday with his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, and five others when his yacht capsized off the coast of Palermo. The cause was a sudden bout of heavy weather or a freak waterspout — a tornado over the water — that struck his 56m (183ft) vessel, Bayesian, in the small hours of Monday while everyone slept.

Seven weeks before, I had been with the tech tycoon known as Britain’s Bill Gates in his sitting room in Chelsea, west London. It was to be his first big interview after his shock acquittal on 15 fraud charges brought by the US Department of Justice. It would be his last.

For 2½ hours, we talked about his unlikely arc from son of Irish immigrants to one of Britain’s richest men, and how he had, against all the odds, been given “a second life”. He mused: “The question is: what do you want to do with it?”

• Mike Lynch: Flown to the US in chains, now he is free … and talking

It was an interview that he thought he would never give. Lynch had been accused of orchestrating an immense financial fraud. US marshals had put him in chains the previous year and extradited him to San Francisco for a trial that he was almost certain to lose. Less than one half of 1 per cent of US federal criminal cases end in a “not guilty” verdict. Facing up to 25 years in prison, the 59-year-old assumed he would likely die, far from these shores, in a federal jail. “I have various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive,” he told me. Before he left, he said, he, “put everything in order for the family”.

Lynch had unswervingly insisted on his innocence. On June 6, a jury of 12 Americans acquitted him on all counts. The verdict stunned the business world, and brought to a sudden end to a nightmare that began 12 years before, when HPE, the US tech giant that had bought his business software company Autonomy for $11.7 billion (£8.8 billion), accused him of manipulating its accounts. The charges set in motion an epic legal fight on both sides of the Atlantic.

When we met last month, he was still very much in the throes of accepting a reality that, for years, he had not allowed himself to countenance. “My grasp on reality is quite shaky,” he said. “I found it more helpful to assume the worst.” As he spoke Faucet, the Shetland sheepdog he had acquired in San Francisco and had become his most faithful companion during 13 months of house arrest, snoozed on his thigh. Of Lynch’s six dogs — “My rule is to always have one more dog than is sensible” — Faucet held a special place. “He’s like the guy that walks into the bar that everyone loves.”

• Mike Lynch obituary

Lynch seemed in a great rush to make up for lost time. The legal fight, and particularly his house arrest leading up to the trial, meant missing time with his two daughters, Hannah, who just finished A-levels, and her 22-year-old sister Esme, and his wife, Angela Bacares. “I made the decision that I was not going to stop them going on holiday because I couldn’t travel,” he said. “Hopefully, there’ll be some time to catch up with those things.”

The yacht trip through the Mediterranean — with 10 crew and 12 guests — was meant to be exactly that. Lynch had been given his “second life”. It lasted 74 days.

Until a few months ago, I didn’t know Mike Lynch. As a business journalist, I had long known of him. It was impossible not to. He was a titanic figure in the British tech scene, the Cambridge maths boffin who had founded a company in 1996 based on Bayesian statistics, a methodology for calculating probabilities from large amounts of imperfect information. By 2011 Autonomy was Britain’s most valuable tech company, its software used by some of the largest companies in the world.

Lynch had served as science adviser to David Cameron when he was prime minister. Years before AI was a buzzword, he pioneered the field. “Mike Lynch’s PhD at Cambridge put him at the very forefront of modern artificial intelligence,” said Suranga Chandratillake of investment firm Balderton Capital. “Before transformers, OpenAI and large language models, there was Autonomy and its dynamic reasoning engine — a technology that enabled computers to build probabilistic models of ‘intelligence’ by reading through vast volumes of documents.”

His ability to leverage his technical nous into billion-pound companies made him a singular figure in Britain. He also co-founded cybersecurity giant Darktrace.

Lynch stirred strong opinions. Some found him an inspirational figure. Others found him a bully. “His intelligence was, to me, what a galaxy was to a planet,” said Poppy Gustafsson, co-founder and chief executive of Darktrace. “The best advice I ever received was from Mike. In fact, probably the top five best pieces of advice I ever received were from Mike. The most brutal feedback I ever received was also from Mike.”

In Britain, Autonomy stood apart as a homegrown success story with global reach. In 2011 HPE, a corporate basket case whose core printer business was going into reverse, thought it could remake itself into a software company. Its bet was that by buying Autonomy, it could supercharge that overhaul.

The deal made Lynch wildly wealthy — his net worth was last estimated at £500 million — but it all went swiftly pear-shaped. From day one, Lynch argued that HPE simply bungled a high-risk takeover. It would not be the first time. Most corporate mergers fail. HPE claimed that it was all Lynch’s fault, painting him as a devious financial mastermind who tricked it into dramatically overpaying for his company.

After years of legal fisticuffs between the two, the US Department of Justice indicted Lynch in 2018. He fought extradition for five years, a period of legal limbo that required him to drive from his family farm in Suffolk to regularly check in at the police station in Ipswich. “Every Monday morning I’d go along to have a chat with my lovely local policeman. We’d talk about the weather and things like that,” he recalled. “The fascinating thing was, you’d sit there in the chair, and the whole of human life goes through the front office of the police station.”

Eventually, he lost that fight. “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone,” he said, “because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.”

The trial started in March. It lasted 11 weeks and by sight, I came to know many of the people who ended up on the Bayesian. Lynch’s wife, Angela, who along with 14 others somehow escaped the yacht before it sank, sat in the front row of the court’s gallery every day. Petite and typically dressed in sensible, dark dresses, she would bring with her a thick black cushion to make the hard wooden benches more endurable. She never spoke to the press while in San Francisco, silently waving off any request. “She’s one of these people that wakes up every morning, keeps the family happy and everything. She’s been wonderful,” Lynch said of his wife. “And now, you know, after all this long battle, it’s done.”

Jonathan Bloomer, 70, a City executive and friend of Lynch, flew over to testify on his behalf. The next day, he showed up in trainers and jeans, to take in the proceedings as a spectator before his red-eye back to London. “The US system,” he said through a knowing smile in the halls outside the courtroom, “is very different from the British.” He gave a pursed smile and declined to elaborate.

The bodies of Bloomer and his wife Judith were recovered by Italian divers on Thursday. As were those of Chris Morvillo, the New York-based lawyer who dismantled the case against Lynch, and of his wife, Neda.

In a recent podcast, Morvillo recalled the moment they heard the verdict in a case that had consumed more than a decade of his professional life. “It was this electric moment, I have never seen anything like it in a courtroom before,” he said. “Grown people sobbing, hugging, people clapping, it was remarkable.” The body of Recaldo Thomas, the yacht’s cook, was recovered on Monday.

Esme, Lynch’s eldest daughter, who is reading physics at Imperial College London, was not on the trip. She paid tribute to her sister, calling Hannah, “my little angel, my star”.

Among the surviving passengers was Charlotte Golunski, 35, an employee at Invoke Capital, Lynch’s investment firm, and her one-year-old daughter, who she held above the waves while all she heard around her were screams in the night. She and the others managed to swim to a lifeboat and were rescued by the crew of a nearby vessel.

Giovanni Costantino, chief executive of The Italian Sea Group, which designed the Bayesian, told Sky news that the boat was “unsinkable”. An investigation into how it ended up at the bottom of the sea continues.

The tragedy was all the more unbelievable because two days previously, Stephen Chamberlain, 52, the Autonomy finance executive who was Lynch’s co-defendant, was hit by a car and fatally injured while out jogging near his home in Cambridgeshire. Throughout the trial he sat, stone-faced, at the same table with Lynch as federal prosecutors laid out their case. He, too, was acquitted on all counts. Lynch lamented that he had been drawn into the trial at all. “He was someone I barely dealt with,” he said. “It’s very unfortunate that he got sort of swept into it.” Chamberlain’s family paid tribute to him as “an amazing individual whose only goal in life was to help others in any way possible”.

Online, conspiracies emerged as people loudly questioned whether the deaths, happening in quick succession to so many people intimately involved in the same high-profile case, were more than just a horrific coincidence. There is no evidence to suggest that.

The tragedy has, however, raised a fraught question for HPE, which in 2022 won a separate civil case against Lynch. The tech giant has demanded $4 billion in damages. The judge is expected to rule before the end of the year and has indicated that any penalty would be smaller. But it raises the question: will HPE seek to extract potentially hundreds of millions of pounds from a widow also grieving the loss of her daughter?

HPE said: “We do not think it appropriate to comment on the ongoing legal matters in these tragic circ*mstances.”

I can’t claim to have known Lynch. An accident of geography — I happened to be based in the same city where his trial took place — simply meant I could step in to witness the denouement of a bewildering, high-stakes chapter of his life, and then have the privilege of telling his story as he pondered his new lease on life.

In my dealings with him, I saw some of the attributes highlighted last week by his friend Patrick Jacob. Lynch, he said, was, “never dull and always ready for a lively debate … He could be challenging and direct, but I never came away from seeing him without feeling my life was enriched by the experience.” An engineer to his bones, he enthused about a 100-year-old functioning model steam train on display at his home in London. “They’re very good for entertaining dogs and small children,” he said.

He lit up when he spoke of the “wonderful 23-year-old engineers” he mentored, and of his desire to spark a conversation about this AI era we had entered, and the changes it would soon unleash across society. The role of humans, he warned, was bound to change as machines get better at doing the things we think only us humans can do. We will become more curator, and less creator. “That’s a new idea,” he said through the slightest of grins. “And it’s not one that people don’t like.”

When it came time for the trial, he was not content to simply let his lawyers run the show. He had his security detail — Lynch had to pay for 24-hour armed guards as part of his house arrest arrangement — to source two people to be his “shadow jury”. They found a barman and clerk. Lynch paid them to sit through all 11 weeks of the turgid proceedings, as the government sought to prove that he and Chamberlain had used every trick in the book to manipulate Autonomy’s accounts.

At the end of each day, Lynch’s legal team would then quiz the “shadow jurors” about which arguments landed, what was clear, and what wasn’t. “I think my lawyers were a little worried at the beginning, that it’d be like a scorecard on them on a daily basis,” he said. “But by the end, there was quite eager enthusiasm.”

As he sat on his sofa in London, Lynch radiated a mix of incredulity at the many turns his life had taken, and an enthusiasm to re-engage fully with the things he loved — being a father, a husband, a mentor, a maths nerd deeply engaged in this AI era — unencumbered by an ever-present sense of legal peril. He also appeared to have stumbled on a new sense of purpose. Top of his to-do list was to create an organisation akin to the Innocence Project in America, to help those without the means to mount a proper legal defence, a project that would probably have never crossed his mind had he not experienced it himself.

“One of the things I’m thinking about at the moment is, you know, in an ideal world, would you just go back to your previous life, as if this all never happened? Or would you want to keep the insight? When you’ve been through what I’ve been through, a lot of things seem very trivial,” he said.

He never got round to answering his own question, but one got a decent sense of which way he was leaning. “The reason I pause,” he said, “is that I’ve led an incredible life.”