Mike Lynch, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who died in a yacht accident that took seven lives on Aug. 19, was once a high-profile figure in the U.K. A colorful character and self-made businessman, his recent testimony in a U.S. legal battle may shed some light on a controversial tech leader with a nearly unbelievable rags-to-riches story.
Lynch was the cofounder and former CEO of Autonomy, a software firm he sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011, in what became a much-criticized deal for the tech giant. HP had to write down $8.8 billion of the $11 billion price paid and later accused Lynch and other top executives of conspiring to defraud the company and falsifying documents to inflate the value of the firm.
HP sued Autonomy and largely prevailed in a civil trial in the U.K. In a separate U.S. criminal case, Autonomy’s former CFO, Sushovan Hussain, pleaded guilty to several counts of wire fraud and conspiracy, and was sentenced to five years in prison. Lynch and Autonomy’s vice president of finance, Stephen Chamberlain, were also charged with conspiracy and fraud in a separate U.S. criminal case. After a six-year legal saga, including a three-month jury trial in a federal court in San Francisco, both men were acquitted in early June. Just a few months later, they died on the same day, miles apart, in freak accidents.
Transcripts from Lynch’s criminal trial this year—during which he took the unusual step of testifying in his own defense—reveal fascinating details about his life, and include vignettes from his childhood and early years. Answering questions from his own criminal defense attorney, Chris Morvillo, who also died in the yacht accident, he talked about the early experiences that helped shape his worldview, offering insights into the man whose shocking death has drawn global interest.
Lynch’s early life
Lynch, who was 59 when he died, was born into a working-class Irish immigrant family living in East London, but ended up attending famously elitist Cambridge University, where he eventually earned a PhD in artificial neural networks. The son of a firefighter father and a mother who was a nurse, his depiction of his own life path suggests he lived a British version of the American dream.
To illustrate his parents’ financial hardships, he told jurors: “The family story is that the day after they got married they had to go and beg the bank manager for a loan, which was £4—I think that’s about $6—so we always joke in the family that we started from minus $6, and we sort of measure it from there.”
Lynch acknowledged his good fortune, describing how he landed a scholarship to a prestigious private school for bright students, thanks to a Lord Mayor of London in the 1600s. The mayor in question was also a draper—someone who historically sold cloth and curtains—and he bequeathed his wealth “for the education of poor boys,” said Lynch.
“So a great irony of life is a man in the 1600s actually changed mine,” he said.
At age 16, Lynch got a hospital job through his mother, and the future tycoon started out mopping floors. “I was very—I’m still a demon mopper, so I can do that,” he said.
“Your credibility is on the line here, Dr. Lynch,” his lawyer Morvillo said.
“Give me a mop and I'll show you,” Lynch responded. “There’s an art form to it, you know,” he said, “but another conversation.”
The transcript shows the exchange elicited laughter from the courtroom.
‘Whatever it is you want to do, just do it’
Eventually, Lynch became a hospital porter, according to his testimony, wheeling people around in beds, before reaching the pinnacle of his hospital career: He became “the guy that gave out the jam sandwiches and tea.”
“And tea is an incredibly important thing in British culture,” he said.
“Turns out, that was an incredibly important job and very formative for me,” he added.
The young Lynch would end his shifts in the geriatric ward, where nurses didn’t have time to talk to the patients, he said. “When you’re 16 years old, you think you’re invincible,” he recalled. “And then … you’re talking to a 95-year-old, and they know they’re not going to leave the hospital, and they tell you all the things they wouldn’t tell anyone else, and you hear about their lives, and then you realize what that arc of existence is, and that’s a great thing.”
“There’s also the day that you turn the corner with your trolley and you look down the ward and the bed’s empty,” Lynch continued. “And what that led to me doing was realizing, you know, get on with it. Do stuff,” he said. “Whatever it is you want to do, just do it.”
The man who came to be known as the British Bill Gates offered thoughts on class, too. Lynch reminded his U.S. audience that in the U.K., where health care is universal, hospitals are filled with people from every walk of life, “and you learn that you could never judge people from afar. Very wealthy people would sometimes treat you with great kindness or could be awful, and people who probably had a similar job to your one could be wonderful and kind or they could be awful,” he told the courtroom. “And it was just down to the individuals.”
Later in his testimony, Lynch used an analogy to explain his interpretation of the evidence presented by prosecutors about Autonomy’s alleged schemes to defraud Hewlett-Packard and lie to auditors.
“One thing to bear in mind is if you take a microscope into even the most spotless kitchen, you will find a bacteria. That’s real, and if it wasn’t there, there would be something very abnormal. So I don’t think Autonomy was any different [from other companies],” he said.
The prosecution, of course, disagreed. Throughout the trial, opposing counsel used several pieces of evidence—including email messages from the period around the sale—attempting to demonstrate that Lynch and Chamberlain were aware of financial misdeeds at Autonomy.
In closing, prosecutor Robert Leach told the jurors that unlike other witnesses in the case, at Autonomy, “Dr. Lynch, of course, was at the top. He was in control. He domineered.”
The jury, it turned out, was not convinced.
