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 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.
Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images
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.
The Tencent logo is displayed on the exterior of a building at the company’s headquarters, with a surveillance camera visible in the foreground, on November 30, 2024, in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Tencent on Wednesday reported a 15% jump in second-quarter revenue as a strong performance in its gaming unit and AI investments boosted growth.
Here’s how Tencent did in the first quarter of 2025:
Revenue: 184.504 billion Chinese yuan ($25.7 billion), compared to 161.117 billion Chinese yuan in the same period last year
Operating profit: 63.052 billion yuan, versus 57.313 billion yuan last year
Domestic games revenue, which accounts for sales from China, rose 17% year-on-year to 40.4 billion yuan thanks to the performance of the company’s newly-released “Delta Force” game and evergreen titles such as “Honor of Kings,” “VALORANT” and “Peacekeeper Elite.”
Revenue from its international gaming business totaled 18.8 billion yuan, a 35% year-on-year increase driven by games such as “PUBG Mobile,” and the recently-released “Dune: Awakening.”
Meanwhile, Tencent said that AI-driven improvements to the company’s advertising platform and Weixin transaction ecosystem helped boost marketing services revenue by 20% in the quarter to 35.8 billion yuan.
“During the second quarter of 2025, we delivered double-digit revenue and non-IFRS operating profit growth on a year-on-year basis, as we invested in, and also benefitted from, utilising AI,” said Tencent CEO Ma Huateng.
Tencent said its capital expenditures surged 119% to 19.1 billion yuan in the second quarter, as the tech giant invested in AI upgrades for advertising, its gaming business and social media service Weixin.
The Shenzhen-headquartered company’s music unit posted better-than-expected results thanks to growth in strong growth from subscription and non-subscription online music revenue, according to Citi’s Alicia Yap. The firm said Tencent Music had 124 million music subscribers, up slightly from 123 million subscribers noted in Tencent’s first-quarter report.
Looking ahead to the second half of the year, Tencent Music “continues to drive high-quality growth in subscription revenues, growth momentum from fans economy, concert and ad revs will support faster-than-previously expected full year growth,” Yap said in a note.
Tencent, like other cloud computing firms, has put a higher focus on selling artificial intelligence tools as a way to boost revenue and differentiate its offerings from those of its rivals.
“We are striving to bring further benefits of AI to consumers and enterprises through powering more use cases within Weixin, driving usage of our AI native app Yuanbao, and upgrading the capabilities of our HunYuan foundation models,” Huateng said in the Wednesday earnings release.
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
As part of the offering, Circle is offering its underwriters a 30-day option to buy an additional 1.5 million shares.
Circle shares closed Tuesday up 1.3% after the company reporting its first quarterly results as a publicly traded company. While charges tied to its IPO weighed on its second-quarter results and led to a loss of $4.48 per share, it saw revenue rise 53% on the back of strong stablecoin growth.
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Mike Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, speaks at the Nasdaq headquarters in New York on March 28, 2025.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
CoreWeave shares fell about 6% in extended trading on Tuesday even as the provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure beat estimates for second-quarter revenue
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: Loss of 21 cents
Revenue: $1.21 billion vs. $1.08 billion expected
Revenue more than tripled from $395.4 million a year earlier, CoreWeave said in a statement. The company registered a $290.5 million net loss, compared with a $323 million loss in second quarter of 2024. CoreWeave’s earnings per share figure wasn’t immediately comparable with estimates from LSEG.
CoreWeave’s operating margin shrank to 2% from 20% a year ago due primarily to $145 million in stock-based compensation costs. This is CoreWeave’s second quarter of full financial results as a public company following its IPO in March.
CoreWeave pointed to an expansion in business with OpenAI, a major client and investor. Also during the quarter, CoreWeave acquired Weights and Biases, a startup with software for monitoring AI models, for $1.4 billion.
In May, management touted 420% revenue growth, alongside widening losses and nearly $9 billion in debt. The stock still doubled anyway over the course of the next month.
CoreWeave shares became available on Nasdaq at the end of the first quarter, after the company sold 37.5 shares at $40 each, yielding $1.5 billion in proceeds. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was trading at $148.75 for a market cap of over $72 billion.
A CoreWeave data center project with up to 250 megawatts of capacity is set to be delivered in 2026, the company said in the statement.
Executives will discuss the results and issue guidance on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
