‘Britain’s Bill Gates’: Who is Mike Lynch, the UK tech entrepreneur missing after superyacht sinks?
Mike Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He was acquitted of fraud charges in June after defending himself in a trial over allegations that he artificially inflated Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale to tech giant Hewlett Packard.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges in June in a landmark trial over allegations made by Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company when he sold it to the U.S. enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.
Just two months after his acquittal, Lynch — who was once lauded by the U.K. national press as “Britain’s Bill Gates” — was reported missing Monday after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily.
The yacht, called the Bayesian, capsized at around 4 a.m. local time while anchored off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village located in the province of Palermo in Italy. It was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm, according to local media reports.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is among the 15 people who were rescued after the yacht’s collapse. At least one man has died, while six people — including Lynch’s daughter Hannah — remain unaccounted for, officials have said.
Sicily’s civil protection agency told reporters late Monday that Morgan Stanley International chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda were also missing as difficult search and rescue efforts resumed on Tuesday.
In a separate incident Saturday, Stephen Chamberlain, the former vice president of finance at Autonomy and a co-defendant in Lynch’s trial, died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire, Chamberlain’s lawyer told Reuters news agency.
Who is Mike Lynch?
Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups, which he founded in 2012.
He became the target of a protracted legal battle with Hewlett Packard after the technology firm accused Lynch of inflating Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale. HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy within a year of buying it.
Lynch was extradited from Britain to the U.S. last year to stand trial over the HP allegations. He faced criminal charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly scheming to inflate Autonomy’s revenue starting in 2009 in a bid to entice a buyer.
But two months ago, Lynch, who has long denied the accusations, was acquitted of fraud charges in a surprise victory following the trial, which lasted for three months.
During the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense, denying wrongdoing and telling jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.
Prosecutors had alleged Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased finance executive Chamberlain, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.
These included back-dated agreements and so-called “round-tripping” deals that sought to artificially inflate Autonomy’s sales by fronting cash cash to customers through fake contracts.
Lynch told jurors that he was focused on technology-related matters at Autonomy and left accounting and money decisions to the company’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain.
Hussain was separately convicted in the U.S. in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.
‘Britain’s Bill Gates’
Lynch was born in Ilford, a large town in East London, in 1965 and grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex.
He attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas including electronics, mathematics and biology. After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signals processing and communications.
Toward the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a firm which produced designs and audio products for the music industry.
A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted the South Yorkshire Police among its customers.
But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company scaled into one of Britain’s biggest tech firms.
Lynch held a lot of influence in the U.K. technology sphere at the height of his success, having once been dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates by the media.
He was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC. He also once served as an advisor to the British government on the Council for Science and Technology.
In his role as head of venture firm Invoke, Lynch was closely involved in helping British cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal software startup Luminance get off the ground, backing both firms with sizable sums of cash.
Publicly-listed Darktrace, which had fended off similar allegations of inflating its revenues by U.S. short seller Quintessential Capital Management (QCM), earlier this year agreed a deal to bought out and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.
Lynch previously made the Forbes’ billionaires list in 2014 and 2015, with an estimate net worth of $1 billion, according to the business news outlet. However, while facing legal costs in the dispute with HP, he dropped off the list in 2016.
Legal struggles aside, Lynch has several hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.
“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn during an interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the medieval times and none of them have any Apple products whatsoever.”
Lynch reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in the East of England, to recover from his U.S. legal battle, the local East Anglian Times newspaper reported.
Weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper of how he feared dying in prison if found guilty over the HP allegations.
“‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch said in the interview with The Times.
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.
A soldier walks next to a Tesla Cybertruck, which was donated to the National Guard, after powerful winds fueling devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area forced people to evacuate, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles, California, U.S. Jan. 13, 2025.
Daniel Cole | Reuters
Tesla started offering discounts on new Cybertruck vehicles in its inventory this week, according to listings on the company’s website.
Discounts are as high as $1,600 off new Cybertrucks, with the reduced price depending on configuration, and up to around $2,600 for demo versions of the trucks in inventory, the listings show. Production of the angular, unpainted steel pickups has reportedly slowed in recent weeks at Tesla’s factory in Austin, Texas.
Deliveries of the unconventional pickup began reaching customers in 2023. CEO Elon Musk originally unveiled the Cybertruck in 2019 and said it would cost around $40,000, but its base price in the U.S. was closer to $80,000 over the course of 2024.
Wall Street previously viewed the Cybertruck as an important driver of growth for Tesla’s core automotive sales.
While the Cybertruck outsold the Ford Lightning F-150 last year in the U.S. and became the fifth best-selling EV domestically, according to data tracked by Cox Automotive, its high price, repeat recalls and production issues in Austin hampered growth. In November, Tesla initiated its sixth recall in a year to replace defective drive inverters.
As CNBC previously reported, Tesla’s deliveries declined slightly year-over-year in 2024, even as EV demand worldwide reached a record. A slew of new competitive models from a wide range of automakers eroded Tesla’s market share.
According to Cox data, full-year EV sales reached an estimated 1.3 million in 2024 in the U.S., an increase of 7.3% from the prior year. But Tesla’s sales for the year declined by about 37,000 vehicles.
The Tesla Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedan ranked as the top two best-selling EVs by a wide margin. But both older, more affordable Tesla models saw sales drop from the previous year. Cox estimated Tesla sold around 38,965 Cybertrucks in the U.S. last year.
In recent days, Musk apologized to customers in California for delays in delivering their Cybertrucks. He said the trucks are now being used to bring supplies and wireless internet service to people in Los Angeles impacted by devastating wildfires.
“Apologies to those expecting Cybertruck deliveries in California over the next few days,” Musk wrote on X. “We need to use those trucks as mobile base stations to provide power to Starlink Internet terminals in areas of LA without connectivity. A new truck will be delivered end of week.”
David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, speaks during the Reuters NEXT conference, in New York City, U.S., December 10, 2024.
Mike Segar | Reuters
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says there’s an end in sight to the multi-year IPO drought.
“It’s going to pick up,” Solomon said on Wednesday, in an on-stage interview with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins at a summit hosted by the computer networking company in Silicon Valley. “It’s been slow, it’s been turned off.”
Solomon, who flew to California for the event just after his Wall Street bank reported fourth-quarter results that blew past analysts’ estimates, said the capital markets broadly are showing signs of life ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week.
The tech IPO market has largely been dormant since the end of 2021, when tech stocks started falling out of favor due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates. Mergers and acquisitions have been difficult in technology because of hefty regulation that’s restricted the ability for the biggest companies to grow through dealmaking.
Solomon said the mood is changing, and he expects momentum M&A as well as in IPOs.
“We have a more constructive kind of optimism, which always helps,” Solomon said. He later added that, “broadly speaking, I think it’s an improved business environment.”
Earlier in the day, Solomon said on his company’s earnings call that Trump’s election and a swing back to Republican power in Washington is already starting to make an impact in the business world. He noted on the call that “there is a significant backlog from sponsors and an overall increased appetite for dealmaking supported by an improved regulatory backdrop.”
Solomon’s comments on the call and at the Cisco event came on a day when the S&P 500 posted his biggest gain since November, helped by a tame inflation report and Goldman’s results. Goldman’s stock popped 6% on Wednesday.
While the stock market has had a strong two-year run and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit fresh records last month, IPOs have yet to see a resurgence. Cloud software vendor ServiceTitan debuted on the Nasdaq in December, marking the first significant venture-backed IPO in the U.S. since Rubrik in April.
“The values came down after 2021, people are growing back into those values,” Solomon said at the Cisco summit.
Some companies have said they’re ready. Chipmaker Cerebras filed to go public in September, but the process was slowed down due to a review by the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS. In November, online lender Klarna said it had confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC.
Though he’s bullish about what’s coming, Solomon said that there are structural reasons not to go public. He said 25 years ago there were roughly 13,000 public companies in the U.S., and today that number has come down to 3,800. There are higher standards around disclosure for being public, and there’s now tons of private capital available “at scale.”
“It’s not fun being a public company,” Solomon acknowledged. “Who would want to be a public company?”
WATCH: Goldman Sachs tops estimates
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
If TikTok does indeed go dark on Sunday for Americans, there may be a tool for them to continue accessing the popular social app: VPNs.
The Chinese-owned app is set to be removed from mobile app stores and the web for U.S. users on Sunday as a result of a law signed by President Joe Biden in April 2024 requiring that the app be sold to a qualified buyer before the deadline.
Barring a last-minute sale or reprieve from the Supreme Court, the app will almost certainly vanish from the app stores for iPhones and Android phones. It won’t be removed from people’s phones, but the app could stop working.
TikTok plans to shut its service for Americans on Sunday, meaning that even those who already have the app downloaded won’t be able to continue using it, according to reports this week from Reuters and The Information. Apple and Google didn’t comment on their plans for taking down the apps from their app stores on Sunday.
“Basically, an app or a website can check where users came from,” said Justas Palekas, a head of product at IProyal.com, a proxy service. “Based on that, then they can impose restrictions based on their location.”
Masking your physical internet access point
That may stop most users, but for the particularly driven Americans, using VPNs might allow them to continue using the app.
VPNs and a related business-to-business technology called proxies work by tunneling a user’s internet traffic through a server in another country, making it look like they are accessing the internet from a location different than the one they are physically in.
This works because every time a computer connects to the internet, it is identified through an IP number, which is a 12-digit number that is different for every single computer. The first six digits of the number identifies the network, which also includes information about the physical region the request came from.
In China, people have used VPNs for years to get around the country’s firewall, which blocks U.S. websites such as Google and Facebook. VPNs saw big spikes in traffic when India banned TikTok in 2020, and people often use VPNs to watch sporting events from countries where official broadcasts aren’t available.
As of 2022, the VPN market was worth nearly $38 billion, according to the VPN Trust Initiative, a lobbying group.
“We consistently see significant spikes in VPN demand when access to online platforms is restricted, and this situation is no different,” said Lauren Hendry Parsons, privacy advocate at ExpressVPN, a VPN provider that costs $5 per month to use.
“We’re not here to endorse TikTok, but the looming U.S. ban highlights why VPNs matter— millions rely on them for secure, private, and unrestricted access to the internet,” ProtonVPN posted on social media earlier this week. ProtonVPN offers its service for $10 a month.
The price of VPNs
Both ExpressVPN and ProtonVPN allow users to set their internet-access location.
Most VPN services charge a monthly fee to pay for their servers and traffic, but some use a business model where they collect user data or traffic trends, such as when Meta offered a free VPN so it could keep an eye on which competitors’ apps were growing quickly.
A key tradeoff for those who use VPN is speed due to requests having to flow through a middleman computer to mask a users’ physical location.
And although VPNs have worked in the past when governments have banned apps, that doesn’t ensure that VPNs will work if TikTok goes dark. It won’t be clear if ExpressVPN would be able to access TikTok until after the ban takes place, Parsons told CNBC in an email. It’s also possible that TikTok may be able to determine Americans who try to use VPNs to access the app.
(L-R) Sarah Baus of Charleston, S.C., holds a sign that reads “Keep TikTok” as she and other content creators Sallye Miley of Jackson, Mississippi, and Callie Goodwin of Columbia, S.C., stand outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building as the court hears oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the U.S., on January 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
VPNs and proxies to evade regional restrictions have been part of the internet’s landscape for decades, but their use is increasing as governments seek to ban certain services or apps.
Apps are removed by government request all the time. Nearly 1500 apps were removed in regions due to government takedown demands in 2023, according to Apple, with over 1,000 of them in China. Most of them are fringe apps that break laws such as those against gambling, or Chinese video game rules, but increasingly, countries are banning apps for national security or economic development reasons.
Now, the U.S. is poised to ban one of the most popular apps in the country — with 115 million users, it was the second most downloaded app of 2024 across both iOS and Android, according to an estimate provided to CNBC from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.
“As we witness increasing attempts to fragment and censor the internet, the role of VPNs in upholding internet freedom is becoming increasingly critical,” Parsons said.
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