The news has sent shockwaves around the world since it broke on Monday: Mike Lynch, the UK tech tycoon worth an estimated £852m and widely referred to as the “Bill Gates of Britain”, is among the six missing in Sicily after the superyacht they were holidaying on sunk off the coast of Palermo.
Officials say the luxury vessel, the Bayesian, was hit by a freak “tornado” before sinking 160ft to the bottom of the sea bed. Fifteen of the 22 onboard have been rescued, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares and a baby believed to be a one-year-old British girl called Sophia, whose mother Charlotte Golunski saved her from drowning by holding her above her head in raging water.
A body believed to be that of the yacht’s chef, named locally as Ricardo Thomas, was found alongside the boat on Monday, while six more remain missing — Lynch, 59, the former chief executive of software firm Autonomy and one of the UK’s richest men, and his daughter Hannah, 18, among them.
"It all happened in really little time,” the captain Karsten Borner told reporters of the tragic sinking, which happened just before 4am local time and apparently took place within “a few minutes” thanks to an catastrophic weather event that the captain did not see coming.
The freak incident has been called tragic, terrifying and “unprecedented”, not least because of the equally extraordinary details to emerge over the hours since: that Lynch’s youngest daughter Hannah, who had just completed her A-Levels at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith and was due to read English at Oxford, is also among the missing; that Lynch had been excited to start a “second life” after being found not guilty in a fraud trial this summer in which he’d been given a 0.5 per cent chance of acquittal; that the cruise had been planned by the father-of-two as a thank you to the loved ones and employees who’d supported him during the decade-long ordeal.
Overnight on Monday, another extraordinary detail has also emerged: Stephen Chamberlain, Lynch’s co-defendant during his decade-long fraud trial, died this week in a separate tragic incident in Cambridgeshire. He was hit by a car while riding his bike and had been placed on life support, but his death was confirmed on Monday — the same day Lynch was confirmed missing.
“My deepest thanks go to my legal team for their tireless work on my behalf,” Lynch said after he and Chamberlain were acquitted by the jury in his high-profile trial in June, speaking of his “indescribable relief” at being back at home in Suffolk with his wife, daughters and their six dogs. “I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field.”
Little could have prepared him or his family for the tragedy that would strike them and their loved ones just two months later.
Here’s everything we know about the missing tycoon so far.
The son of a fireman who became the UK’s first tech billionaire
Lynch’s childhood was a far cry from the life of yachts, million pound properties and luxury he’d become accustomed to before he went missing. He was born to an Irish immigrant family in Ilford, Essex in the 1970s. His father was a fireman from County Cork and his mother was a nurse from County Tipperary in Ireland.
He won a scholarship to Bancroft’s School, a private day school in north-east London, at the age of 11 and went onto read natural sciences at Cambridge University — the chapter in which his fascination with technology began. He completed a doctorate and gained a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition before setting up Cambridge Neurodynamics — a tech firm specialising in finger-print recognition for the police — in 1991.
Five years later he co-founded his now-notorious software and data analysis company Autonomy, which went onto become one of the UK’s most successful startups and led to Lynch being called the UK’s first tech billionaire. He was awarded an OBE for services to enterprise in 2006 and was appointed to the board of the BBC that same year.
By 2011, he’d been elected onto then-prime minister David Cameron’s council for science and technology, advising the then-PM on “the opportunities and risks of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the government's role in the regulation of these technologies.”
He also became a founding investor in the FTSE 100 cyber security firm Darktrace as well as setting up the venture capital company Invoke Capital — successes that earned him the nickname “Britain’s Bill Gates”.
A billionaire lifestyle and the sailboat he adored
For Lynch, the Bayesian was the culmination of decades of hard work. Built in 2008, he’d named his 56-metre, 22-man luxury sailboat after the branch of statistics he’d made the subject of his Cambridge PhD, and typically sailed it around the Mediterranean and Caribbean.
He spoke of it with pride, say staffers. “He had a miniature model of it and photos of it on the water in the hallway,” one told The Times this week of the tech tycoon’s superyacht, now lying “practically intact” on the ocean floor. “When I asked him about it he told me about its size and how much his family loved spending time on it.”
British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter are among six people feared d£ad after his 180ft superyacht Bayesian was hit by a freak waterspout and sank off the coast of Sicily this morning. pic.twitter.com/OeuR8tg9bE
— MayGist (@MayGistv) August 19, 2024
Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares, 57, under whose name the couple’s £852m wealth is held, own a home in Chelsea in west London but live primarily on their farm in Suffolk, where they own six dogs and raise rare breeds of pigs and cows. Their daughters, aged 21 and 18, are both students; the eldest reportedly studying at Imperial College London; the youngest, Hannah, about to start at Oxford University after graduating from Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith — a private school which counts Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant and Heston Blumenthal among alumni — earlier this year. Friends have described her as a gentle, kind, intelligent “supernova” of a young woman, and a staunch feminist.
The tech tycoon had suffered from health issues including a lung condition in recent years, and enjoyed spending as much of his spare time as possible with his family. A former stewardess on the Bayesian described the vessel as a busy boat on which the couple placed “most importance to entertaining their two daughters and their friends”.
The trial that dominated a decade of his career
Much of Lynch’s 2023 was spent living under house arrest in San Francisco with an electronic tag around his ankle as he awaited trial on 17 charges of conspiracy and wire fraud brought by the US Department of Justice.
It was the result of what had been a 12-year legal battle over fraud and conspiracy charges relating to the £8.6bn sale of his company Autonomy to US computer giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011 — a deal that had been hailed his crowning glory at the time, earning him more than £500m.
Hewlett-Packard went onto fire the tech tycoon and accused him and other executives of grossly inflating its size and profits during the sale — an ordeal that saw Lynch going to the UK High Court to fight extradition to the US and culminated in him being flown to California accompanied by the US Marshals Service.
He spent 13 months under house arrest before appearing in a San Francisco courtroom in March this year, defending himself against fraud and conspiracy charges alongside a world-beating legal team featuring the likes of Reid Weingarten, one of America’s most successful white-collar defenders.
Lynch always denied any wrongdoing and he and his former finance executive Stephen Chamberlain went onto win the case, despite being given just a 0.5 per cent chance of acquittal. The tech tycoon said he was “elated” after being acquitted by the jury and avoiding what could have been 25 years in a US prison.
He later told reporters he believed he only got justice because he was rich. “You shouldn't need to have funds to protect yourself as a British citizen,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this month. “The reason I'm sitting here, let's be honest, is not only because I was innocent but because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that's set up to sweep you away.”
He said most people, even they sold all their assets, would run out of funds in a matter of months, a situation that he said "has to change."
I am reeling from this news about Mike Lynch. The terrible irony is that when we sat down last month, he made it clear that he felt he had won a new lease on life, that his acquittal in America gave him a "second life." Read here. https://t.co/XFtwMYPcL8
— Danny Fortson (@dannyfortson) August 19, 2024
Tragedy, just two months into his “second life”
“I'd had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn't know if I'd ever be coming back.”
These were the words Lynch told The Times in his first newspaper interview since being acquitted in June. He admitted he’d feared dying behind bars if found guilty, adding that medical issues meant it would have been “difficult to survive” in jail. “It's bizarre,” he said. “But now you have a second life - the question is, what do you want to do with it?”
Little could have prepared him for the incident that was to take place just two months into that second life.
Listen to @EvanHD's extended interview with Mike Lynch on @BBCSounds https://t.co/h8XtkNTuTC https://t.co/PGy2GFerG5
— BBC Radio 4 PM (@BBCPM) August 19, 2024
Just before 4am on Monday morning — during a luxury cruise around the Aeolian Islands off Sicily in celebration of his acquittal — a freak “tornado” struck the waters off Sicily, where Lynch and 20 of his family, friends and crew had been sleeping in their cabins on the Bayesian.
The anchor of the boat was still down and the storm broke its 248-foot mast — one of the world’s tallest — causing the Bayesian to capsize. Chaos ensued, with passengers trapped inside their cabins and those on deck swept into the sea before 11 of them scrambled onto the boat’s lifeboat. They fired a flare and were rescued by a nearby ship.
Ronald and Lynch’s wife Bacares were among those to make it onto the lifeboat, Bacares telling doctors that she and her husband woke at 4am to the boat tilting and the sound of shattering glass. She was in a wheelchair after being rescued yesterday morning, after suffering abrasions on her feet.
Lynch, his daughter Hannah and four other guests are still unaccounted for, with rescuers indicating that it was unlikely more survivors would be found.
The friends, associates and advisors missing alongside him
Charlotte Golunski, a partner at Invoke Capital, her husband James Emslie and their daughter Sophia. Jonathan Bloomer, 70, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Anne. Ayla Ronald, a Clifford Chance lawyer who was on the team that secured Lynch’s acquittal — who posted a sunset photo from the Bayesian just hours before the sinking. These were just some of the business associates, legal advisors and loved ones on board the Bayesian alongside Lynch when the vessel went down on Monday morning. The ship’s crew were also on board.
Golunski, Emslie and their daughter escaped the sinking, the 36-year-old mother telling reporters about the terrifying moment she found herself holding her daughter in the air after being separated from her husband in the water. “For two seconds I lost the baby in the sea, then I immediately held her again in the fury of the waves. I held her tightly, tightly to me, while the sea was raging. So many were screaming.”
Golunski described her boss Lynch as an “extraordinary person” during interviews with Italian media last night. Ronald is also among the survivors, while Bloomer, his wife and two others are among the missing alongside Lynch and his daughter Hannah.
A cruel twist in an already tragic tale
It was late on Monday evening, just hours after Lynch was announced missing, that the news broke of a second freak incident closer to home: his co-defendant and former vice-president of finance, Stephen Chamberlain, had died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running near his Cambridgeshire home.
Chamberlain had faced the same charges of fraud and conspiracy as Lynch, and like Lynch he’d spoken of looking forward to his freedom and “helping growing companies achieve their goals” after being acquitted of all 15 charges by a jury in San Francisco in June.
“Our dear client and friend Steve Chamberlain was fatally struck by a car on Saturday while out running,” his lawyer Gary Lincenberg said in a statement yesterday. “He was a courageous man with unparalleled integrity, and we deeply miss him. He fought successfully to clear his good name, which lives on through his wonderful family.”
The two tragic incidents are not connected, but the timing certainly adds a chilling layer to what is an already shocking tale unfolding in the Tyrrhenian sea near Palermo.
“With the passage of time it is becoming more difficult to hope for their survival,” loyal mayor Giuseppe D’Agostino said yesterday. For the loved ones of Lynch and the other missing passengers, the agonising wait continues. Our thoughts are with them.
