British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is among the six people missing after a luxury superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, according to sources. The 59-year-old, once hailed as the UK’s answer to Steve Jobs, was aboard the 160-foot Bayesian sailboat with 22 others when it was hit by a tornado near the Porticello harbor at sunrise, according to sources.
At least one passenger has been confirmed dead, while six others, including two Americans, remain missing, according to the Italian coast guard. The yacht is also reportedly owned by Lunch. Sources, who chose to remain anonymous, said that Angela Bacares, Lynch’s wife, was confirmed to have been rescued.
Tech Tycoon Goes Missing
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This incident comes just weeks after Lynch was acquitted of all charges by a U.S. jury in June in the high-profile fraud case connected to the 2011 sale of his software company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard (HP), a case he feared would end with him dying in prison because of a lung condition.
“I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive”, Lynch told the Sunday Times last month. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.”
Born in Ireland, Lynch grew up near Chelmsford in Essex, where his mother worked as a nurse and his father was a firefighter.
He studied physics, mathematics, and biochemistry at Cambridge University, ultimately focusing on adaptive pattern recognition. His doctoral thesis is reportedly among the most widely read research works in the university’s library.
Complicated Life and Career
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After launching several early tech ventures, including one that developed software for automatic number-plate, fingerprint, and facial recognition for the police, he founded Autonomy in 1996.
The company’s software was designed to help businesses analyze vast amounts of data and was partly based on Bayesian inference, a statistical theory developed by the 18th-century statistician, philosopher, and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.
The superyacht that sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm early Monday was named Bayesian.
Autonomy quickly became a successful business. The company went public in Brussels in 1998, and its rapid expansion, along with the dotcom boom, prompted a move to the London Stock Exchange.
There, Autonomy was listed among the FTSE 100, which includes the top UK-listed companies.
Although Lynch’s company was impressive enough for HP to purchase it for over $11 billion in 2011, it took just a year for the U.S. tech giant to write down $8.8 billion on the acquisition, citing “serious accounting improprieties” found at the UK firm.
Since then, Lynch has been engaged in efforts to defend his reputation.
