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.
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LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59 years old.
Just two months ago, Lynch won a stunning victory in a landmark U.S. trial over allegations from Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to the U.S. enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.
Fears for Lynch’s life swirled earlier this week when he was reported missing after the sinking of a yacht — later confirmed as owned by his wife Angela Bacares — off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the province of Palermo in Italy.
Bacares was one of 15 people rescued rescued following the yacht’s collapse earlier this week.
The anchored vessel, a 56-meter (184 feet) sailing yacht named the Bayesian, was hit by a violent storm early Monday morning.
Witnesses told local media the anchored boat, which was carrying 10 crew members and 12 passengers, descended rapidly after its mast broke.
Lynch’s body was retrieved from the wreckage of the yacht Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC Thursday. His daughter, Hannah, remains unaccounted for, according to the source, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the situation. Sky News earlier reported the news.
‘Britain’s Bill Gates’
Born in Ilford, a large town in East London, to Irish parents in 1965, Lynch grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman.
Lynch had a modest upbringing but, at the age of 11, he was awarded a scholarship to attend Bancroft’s School, a private school in Woodford Green, East London.
Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, speaks at a Confederation of British Industry conference in London, U.K., in 2003.
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From Bancroft’s, 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.
Autonomy’s software, made up of pattern-matching algorithms, was touted as a solution that could help employees abstract meaning from unstructured data, including web pages, email, video, audio, and text.
These pattern recognition techniques were based on so-called Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference named after a theorem developed by 18th century statistician Thomas Bayes.
Lynch’s luxury yacht, the Bayesian, was named after this mathematical model.
Autonomy founder Mike Lynch poses at the company’s then-offices near Cambridge, U.K, on Thursday, July 19, 2007.
Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images
After the sale of his company to HP, Lynch became known by U.K. national media as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” serving as a rare example of a U.K. businessman who successfully built and scaled a globally significant tech business selling into various markets around the world.
Legal battle with HP
However, Lynch’s reputation would go on to take a hit after the deal with HP took a turn for the worse. In 2012, HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy — just a year after buying it.
This came despite pressure on the U.K. government from Lynch’s supporters not to allow his extradition.
U.S. prosecutors had filed criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy for an alleged scheme to inflate Autonomy’s revenue starting in 2009, partly to entice a buyer.
However, in a stunning victory in June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges following trial. The trial lasted three months.
Mike Lynch leaves the Rolls Building in London following the civil case over his £8.4 billion sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Picture date: Monday March 25, 2019.
Dominic Lipinski | PA Images | Getty Images
During the course of the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense. He denied wrongdoing and told jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.
Prosecutors had alleged Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased finance executive Stephen Chamberlain, who also died in a tragic car crash Saturday, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.
These included back-dated agreements, concealing the firm’s loss-making business by reselling hardware, and intimidating or paying off individuals who had raised concerns.
However, Lynch told jurors he had focused on tech-related matters at Autonomy, not finances.
Accounting and money decisions were left to Autonomy’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, he said.
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.
Lynch’s influence on UK tech
Alongside founding Autonomy, Lynch also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups. He founded Invoke in 2012.
He became a key voice supporting the U.K. technology industry, backing key names like cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal tech firm Luminance.
Publicly listed Darktrace, which had fended off similar allegations of inflating its revenue by U.S. short seller Quintessential Capital Management, earlier this year agreed to a deal to be bought out and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.
Lynch was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC, and once also served as an advisor to the U.K. government on the Council for Science and Technology.
In 2014 and 2015, he made the Forbes’ billionaires list, with an estimate net worth of $1 billion. However, while facing legal costs amid his dispute with HP, he dropped off that list in 2016.
Legal struggles aside, Lynch had several hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.
Mike Lynch, founder of software firm Autonomy, at the company’s headquarters in, Cambridge, U.K., Aug. 24, 2000.
Bryn Colton | Hulton Archive | Getty Images
“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in a 2016 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.”
Prior to his passing, Lynch had 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.
Just 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.
Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022.
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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.
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NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Mustafa Yalcin | Anadolu | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.
Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.
AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.
That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.
Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.
Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.
The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.
“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.
Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.
Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.
Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.
The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.
“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.
Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”