The storm is up, and all is on the hazard.
—William Shakespeare
A freakish storm out of nowhere. An “unsinkable” super-yacht that ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Seven dead, including England’s first tech billionaire, 59-year-old Mike Lynch, known as the British Bill Gates, who had, just two months earlier, been exonerated for fraud, concluding a 12-year legal battle. And in that boat, 164 feet under the waves, a locked, watertight safe containing the encrypted hard drives of Darktrace, Lynch’s cybersecurity company, whose clients included M.I.5 and Mossad.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. And no sooner had the bodies been recovered than various parties began pointing the finger of blame at one another. When news broke that Lynch’s onetime business partner—and fellow defendant—Stephen Chamberlain had died after being hit by a speeding car while jogging just two days earlier, the conspiracy theories began to swirl.
She Has Sunk
A 17th-century Dutch explorer was the first European to see a black swan, until then not thought to exist, which led to the term “black-swan event,” signifying a startling, unlikely occurrence.
Shortly before daybreak on August 19, 2024, just off the coast of Porticello, east of Palermo, a sudden squall rose up. Despite a weather forecast of isolated thunderstorms, the wind became violent, rising to a force 12 on the Beaufort scale: hurricane strength. Italian authorities would describe it simply as a “downburst,” but eyewitnesses described a waterspout—a tornado over water. Karsten Börner, captain of the Sir Robert Baden Powell, which was moored nearby, recalled to the Financial Times “tons of water coming down. I never saw that before.”
Waterspouts don’t turn up on radar, so any boat in its path would not have seen it coming. Even if they did, there was no time to weigh anchor and move out of the way.
Around 4 a.m., Lynch and his wife, Angela Bacares, were awakened when their 184-foot yacht, the Bayesian, began to tilt. At first, they were not concerned, until they heard the sound of shattering glass. Then they began to panic.
Beset by a howling wind, the boat likely started dragging its anchor and suddenly keeled over on its right side. The mast—the second tallest in the world—lay on the seabed. Bacares escaped to the deck by scrambling over shards of broken glass in her bare feet while Lynch apparently stayed behind, confident, perhaps, of the seaworthiness of their luxury yacht.
Within 16 minutes, the Bayesian was entirely underwater.
“My first mate said, ‘she has gone, she has sunk,’ and I was laughing at him, saying such a big thing doesn’t disappear in a minute. But he was right,” said Captain Börner, whose vessel, despite being just around 300 yards away, was undamaged. “I’ve never seen a vessel of this size go down so quickly. Within a few minutes, there was nothing left.” The Bayesian, with six people still on board, lay on its starboard side at the bottom of the sea.
Captain Börner saw a red flare followed by a white flare go up. He and his first mate boarded a tender and began searching for the Bayesian. “The wind appeared very suddenly out of the blue and it also stopped very, very quickly,” Captain Börner recalled to People. “When it passed, it was quiet again. And that’s when we were able to go out to search.”
Where the yacht had been they saw only cushions and chairs. Then Börner saw a flickering light, which turned out to be “a life raft with a light on the top. And [someone] waved at us with a torch.” When they reached the raft, they found the 15 survivors crowded in the 12-person raft.
Crewmembers of the Bayesian had given first aid to the four injured people while on the raft, including Bacares. The grateful survivors then boarded Börner’s ship, where his crew took care of them. “We helped them with bandages … and dry towels and a blanket for the baby,” Börner said. “We also handed out blankets to everyone and dry clothes and so on.”
“The Coast Guard hadn’t arrived yet at that point,” Börner said, “but when we came back with the survivors, they had already been on the VHF radio and were asking for news of the Bayesian … It took some time for them to arrive.”
Once on the scene, the Coast Guard brought the survivors to ambulances waiting onshore. Despite her injuries, Bacares didn’t want to leave until her husband and daughter were found. Those who survived included Charlotte Golunski, 36, an employee at Lynch’s Invoke Capital, and her husband, James Emslie. Frightened by the sudden squall, they’d left their cabin to go on deck just before the catastrophe struck. A wave rose up and plunged them into the sea. For a few excruciating moments, Golunski lost hold of their one-year-old daughter, Sophie, but another wave miraculously returned the girl to her mother’s arms.
Vincenzo Zagarola, an official with the Italian Coast Guard, described the search for the others as “not easy or quick,” likening the wrecked vessel to an “18-storey building full of water.” Divers searched the Bayesian, but they were limited to just 10 minutes on the bottom due to the depth of the Mediterranean where the yacht had gone down.
Once inside the Bayesian, rescuers found the cabins were blocked. Stephen Edwards, a former captain of the Bayesian, described the obstacles facing those trapped inside. “Those who stayed curled up in bed were in the worst situation,” he said. “The storm hit hard, placing them in the melee of flying furniture, glass, and other items.... People were lying in their beds one minute, and the next the room was on its side.”
Bacares escaped to the deck by scrambling over shards of broken glass in her bare feet while Lynch apparently stayed behind, confident, perhaps, of the seaworthiness of their luxury yacht.
In addition to searching for the missing, divers raced to retrieve Lynch’s personal hard drives and computers, which included data that Italian authorities believed, if recovered intact, could help understand why the boat sank. Lynch didn’t trust sensitive data to the cloud, so he kept two encrypted hard drives in a watertight safe on the Bayesian, now nearly 164 feet under the sea.
The yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, was recovered first, his body found floating near where the yacht had gone down. Thomas’s home was in Antigua, where he lived during the off-season and where he was something of a local hero. “Kids in Antigua would see all these white people working on yachts. For them to see an Antiguan man traveling all over the world—it was important for our community,” a friend recalled to BBC.
It would take four days to bring the six bodies up from the submerged yacht. The postmortems took place at a hospital in Palermo, where it was discovered that four of the casualties had died of asphyxiation, perhaps trapped in dwindling air pockets in the yacht’s cabins; the others had possibly drowned, but an investigation is ongoing.
Christopher Morvillo, Lynch’s 59-year-old American lawyer, who’d represented the tech mogul in his long legal battles, remained missing for three days, until his body was recovered. Morvillo’s wife, Nedda, 57, also perished, along with Jonathan Bloomer, 70, chair of Morgan Stanley International and a former chairman of Lynch’s company, Autonomy, and his wife, Judy, 71. They were trapped in a diminishing bubble of air in their below-deck cabin, in what is often called a “dry drowning.”
Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, also died in her cabin and was the last missing person to be found. One of the divers with the Italian firefighters, Fabio Paoletti, said in The Times of London that she had been the most difficult to find. “The girl was at the end in the last room. She was of small stature and hidden by a mattress, so it took longer to see her.”
Lynch didn’t trust sensitive data to the cloud, so he kept two encrypted hard drives in a watertight safe on the Bayesian, now nearly 164 feet under the sea.
Hannah was a brilliant young scholar, remembered in the Telegraph by Jon Mitropoulos-Monk, head of English at London’s Latymer Upper School, where Hannah was “one of the best English students in the country.” She was headed to Oxford in September to study English. (Ironically, she loved the Romantic poets, such as Shelley, who drowned at sea in 1822 at the age of 29, after being caught in a sudden storm off the coast of Sardinia, in a boat with a flawed design).
Mike Lynch’s body was recovered by the Italian Coast Guard on August 22.
The Wizard of Silicon Fen
Michael Richard Lynch was not your typical tech-bro billionaire. Born in 1965 in Ilford, England, he grew up near Chelmsford in Essex, the child of Irish working-class immigrants. His mother, Dolores, was an intensive-care nurse from County Tipperary, and his father, Michael, was a firefighter from County Cork.
Don’t make “your living running into burning buildings,” he’d cautioned his son. Lynch took the advice to heart, earning a scholarship at the age of 11 to attend Bancrofts School in London, where the young prodigy designed a digital program that sampled music.
At Christ’s College in Cambridge, Lynch earned his Ph.D. in 1990 in signal processing. His thesis was based on the work of 18th-century English philosopher Thomas Bayes, who profoundly influenced Lynch, and for whom he would later name his yacht.
A London-born statistician, philosopher, and minister, Bayes is best known for his posthumously published theorem on probability. Simply put, Bayes’s theorem, sometimes called Bayesian Inference, is a formula used to calculate the conditional probabilities of an event, based on prior, similar conditions. (Bayes had also set out to devise a mathematical proof of the existence of God. “I’m sure he has his answer now,” Lynch once said.)
While still at Cambridge, Lynch founded his first company, Cambridge Neurodynamic, based on the insight that digital technology could recognize and match fingerprints. But British banks refused to lend to him, telling the baby-faced genius to come back when he was older. But a chance meeting at a pub with a promoter for the band Genesis changed his fortune. “He’d never met me before,” Lynch recalled, “but he lent me 2,000 pounds on the spot.” With the funds in his pocket, he bought a secondhand computer and went to work.
In 1996, Lynch co-founded Autonomy, a search-software company that used a statistical method based on Bayesian Inference. He established offices in a marshy area of eastern England (often referred to as “Silicon Fen”). Lynch later described the start-up as merely a handful of “eccentric people working really hard.... No bureaucracy. Lots of late nights, lots of eating cold pizza.”
Before long, Lynch had 2,000 employees across 20 countries, and companies such as BlackRock and AT&T were using his software. Autonomy became one of the U.K.’s top 100 public companies, and Lynch became Britain’s first Internet billionaire. He was christened “Britain’s Bill Gates” in the English press—the wizard of Silicon Fen, science adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron—and awarded an Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.).
From his Cambridge headquarters, Lynch ran his company with flair. He was a James Bond enthusiast of the first order, naming conference rooms after Bond villains—Goldfinger, Dr. No—even keeping a piranha tank in an atrium. He drove an Aston Martin DB5, like his hero, and at his London home he indulged the British love of steam, keeping an old model of a fully operational steam-engine train.
Autonomy became one of the U.K.’s top 100 public companies, and Lynch became Britain’s first Internet billionaire. He was christened “Britain’s Bill Gates.”
Lynch was a family man, devoted to Bacares and their daughters, Esme, 22, and Hannah, 18. But his life would take an unexpected turn in August of 2011.
“This is a momentous day in Autonomy’s history,” Lynch declared in a press release on August 18, 2011, which announced its $11.1 billion sale to Hewlett Packard, the crowning achievement of his career. H.P., which was founded in 1939 in a Palo Alto garage, prided itself on being Silicon Valley’s first start-up. The deal, however, would prove to be Lynch’s undoing.
The Unwanted Stepchild
Just six months after the acquisition, H.P. announced a $6.9 billion loss for that quarter, blaming it on Autonomy. C.E.O. Meg Whitman accused Lynch and his associates of “serious accounting improprieties,” and the company hatched a public-relations offensive called “Project Sutton,” alerting prominent journalists, politicians, and even some regulators that Autonomy—and Lynch—were to blame, due to their “willful efforts … to mislead investors and potential buyers.”
The plan also included a so-called “truth squad” of H.P. employees to check media coverage on Lynch’s alleged fraud to regulators and to “preserve the credibility” of Whitman, who was, perhaps, still smarting over her unsuccessful run for governor of California in 2010, for which she spent $140 million of her own money.
Whitman announced an $8.8 billion write-down, an admission that H.P. had paid Autonomy four times its worth. But it wasn’t simply a bad investment. No, H.P. had been defrauded, they alleged.
Against everyone’s better judgment, Lynch appeared on TV that very afternoon to defend himself against H.P.’s allegations. “It was,” he later said, “the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life, to go on Channel 4 News, live, when this broke.” But Lynch’s ordeal was just beginning. Suddenly, Autonomy was the “unwanted stepchild.”
For their part, Lynch and his executives blamed the failures on H.P.’s management, especially after they fired key Autonomy employees. “We tried really hard to make this work,” Lynch countered. “Instead of doing it the Autonomy way, which is to sweep problems out of the way and move full steam ahead, we got bogged down in H.P. process.”
But for the acquisition to fail so quickly, was Autonomy a paper tiger after all, and Lynch simply the mastermind of a spectacular fraud? The U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California, certainly thought so, issuing a 15-count indictment accusing Lynch and Autonomy of, among other crimes, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and “artificially inflating Autonomy’s revenues by backdating written agreements…. making false and misleading statements to Autonomy’s independent auditor.”
A year after the acquisition, Whitman fired Lynch from the company he’d co-founded, and in 2019, H.P. sued Autonomy in the U.K. The lawsuit would drag on for years before a judge ruled, in 2022, that Lynch had indeed finagled the true value of Autonomy.
H.P. announced a $6.9 billion loss for the latest quarter, blaming it on Autonomy. C.E.O. Meg Whitman accused Lynch and his associates of “serious accounting improprieties.”
But it wasn’t over. H.P. had been gunning for him to face justice in America on federal charges. On the day Lynch lost his civil case, the British government approved his extradition. Five former Cabinet ministers argued against it in The Times of London, but in 2023 Lynch was extradited to San Francisco.
Instead of hauling him away in handcuffs from his Chelsea home, the Metropolitan Police allowed Lynch to meet them around the corner. The U.S. Marshals, on the other hand, put him in shackles at Heathrow and hustled the prisoner on board a United Airlines flight, with a San Francisco Giants cap to protect his identity and a coat draped over his chains. “Once you’re handed into American custody, you’re in a completely different world,” Lynch recalled.
Lynch never liked the culture of Silicon Valley. “You could turn up with a working time machine and be ignored unless you’ve got the right person onboard,” he said. Lynch and his friends once invented a game to be played at Silicon Valley parties, in which they would hatch a rumor about some amazing fictional start-up, then sit back and wait to see how long it took for the rumor to come back to them.
He raised the $100 million bond and was placed under house arrest. The O.B.E., onetime adviser to two British prime ministers, and the wizard of Silicon Fen, once named the most influential tech person in the U.K., was facing decades in prison.
As far as jail cells go, however, this one had its charms. Lynch spent his 13 months of house arrest in a Pacific Heights town house with panoramic views of San Francisco, five bedrooms, four fireplaces, and au pair’s quarters (all at his own expense). He was granted seven days outside when Hannah and Esme were able to visit. To stay out of prison, Lynch agreed to court-ordered armed guards around the clock, which he paid for. Shackled by an ankle monitor, he lived under the eye of surveillance in every room of the house. To keep his sanity, he acquired a Shetland sheepdog he named Faucet.
You could stand outside his town house and hear the plaintive wail of the alto saxophone, which Lynch had taken up in his luxurious imprisonment. As long months passed, Lynch grew close to his security guards, watching the Super Bowl with them. “They turned out to be the most wonderful people,” Lynch later remarked in The Times of London. “I miss them now.”
While under house arrest, Lynch involved himself in his defense, hiring “a shadow jury” (a bartender and a clerk) to sit through the entire three-month court case. At the end of each day, his lawyers would grill them on which arguments, on both sides, were the most persuasive.
A Risky Strategy
Things did not look good for Mike Lynch. He faced 15 counts of conspiracy and wire fraud and 25 years in prison if convicted—a life sentence, given his age and chronic lung condition. According to The Times of London, “less than one half of 1 per cent of U.S. federal criminal cases end in a ‘not guilty’ verdict.” Before he left the U.K., Lynch had put all his assets in order for his wife and two daughters. “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone,” he later said, “because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.” (Autonomy’s chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, had already been found guilty of fraud in the company and was sentenced to five years in a U.S. prison.)
Throughout the trial, Lynch was portrayed by the prosecution as an overbearing taskmaster and likened to a Mafia don. They drilled down on particular transactions so arcane that some jurors actually nodded off. By the 10th week, after more than 30 witnesses had taken the stand, one last witness remained: Mike Lynch himself. It was, as always in a criminal trial, a risky strategy. But the Englishman’s affable manner won over the jurors, blowing up the government’s depiction of him as a master schemer.
Lynch’s co-defendant was 52-year-old Stephen Chamberlain, the vice president in charge of finance. He’d joined Autonomy in 2005, and by 2016, he became the C.F.O. at Lynch’s Darktrace, the cybersecurity company Lynch had founded with his wife. Prosecutors charged him with lying to H.P.’s auditors and helping Sushovan Hussain knowingly make unjustified “adjustments” to their accounts, according to court documents. Unlike Lynch, who’d fought against extradition, Chamberlain voluntarily surrendered to the U.S. district court because he wanted to clear his name. In a sign of their close relationship, Lynch paid Chamberlain’s legal fees.
Chamberlain’s chief lawyer, Gary Lincenberg, a defense attorney at Bird Marella in Los Angeles, argued that Chamberlain had always acted in good faith. Several witnesses for the prosecution were asked if, to their knowledge, Chamberlain had ever misled anyone. The witnesses unanimously answered no. Chamberlain ran his finance department “with a culture of openness and never once tried to deceive the auditors. That was the heart of our defense: good faith.... This guy never lied,” Lincenberg told Fortune magazine when it was all over. “The jurors got it.”
“I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone,” Lynch said, “because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.”
At the trial, Lynch’s chief lawyer, Christopher Morvillo, argued that it was H.P. who’d mismanaged Autonomy after the acquisition. Charles Breyer, the eccentric, bow-tie-wearing judge, dismissed parts of the evidence the prosecution had introduced. (It was Breyer who had presided at Hussain’s trial and sentenced him to prison.)
During the 11 weeks of the trial, Bacares showed up every day to support her husband. Invariably dressed in dark colors, she sat in the front row on a thick cushion she brought with her to make the wooden bench more tolerable.
At the end of the trial, Lynch and Chamberlain were finally acquitted of all federal charges. When the “not guilty” verdict was read out, Lynch and Bacares wept. Morvillo later recalled that there was an outburst of joy in the wood-paneled courtroom on the 17th floor of the San Francisco federal building. “I have never seen anything like it in a courtroom before,” he said in The Times. “Grown people sobbing, hugging, people clapping, it was remarkable.”
During the time of Lynch’s house arrest, both his mother and his brother, Richard, died, and he was unable to attend their funerals. “They never lived to see this resolved,” he said wistfully.
Nonetheless, the first, great tech entrepreneur in Britain was a free man at last. When he returned to his beloved farm in Suffolk, he was reunited with his daughters. Just 9 and 6 years old when his legal troubles began, Esme was now 21, Hannah 18.
It was time to celebrate. Lynch invited 11 of his closest people to join him on his formidable yacht, moored in the Mediterranean just off a little fishing village near Palermo.
What Went Wrong?
The exact cause of the sinking of the Bayesian remains unknown. Giovanni Costantino, head of the Italian Sea Group and owner of the Perini Navi company, which built the Bayesian in 2008, described the yacht as “unsinkable” and theorized that a door or hatch must have been mistakenly left open, for which he blamed the crew. He also felt that they were negligent in not gathering all the passengers on deck and into the life raft. “If [everyone] had been on deck, with lifeboats in the water, the yacht would have gone down, but [all] would have been saved.”
On August 24, Ambrogio Cartosio, the chief prosecutor of the town of Termini Imerese in Sicily, announced that he was opening a manslaughter inquiry into three crew members: the captain, James Cutfield; ship engineer Tim Parker Eaton; and Matthew Griffith, who was on anchor watch at the time.
But two photographs of the yacht taken by a passenger aboard the Sir Robert Baden Powell 14 minutes before the Bayesian sank apparently showed that the door in the hull was in fact closed. Börner himself brought the photographs to the public’s attention, telling Der Spiegel that he was “irritated by repeated attempts by the ship’s builder to pin the blame on the crew.”
Giovanni Costantino, owner of the Perini Navi company, which built the Bayesian in 2008, described the yacht as “unsinkable” and theorized that a door or hatch must have been mistakenly left open.
Another theory was that there was a fatal flaw in the boat’s design. At 184 feet, the Bayesian was one of the world’s largest sailing yachts, built in Viareggio, Italy. Its Japanese-style interior was designed by the Rémi Tessier design company and won “best interior” at the International Superyacht Society Awards in 2008. The following year, the super-yacht was awarded “best exterior styling” at the World Superyacht Awards. So what could possibly have gone wrong?
In the case of heavy seas, water would normally wash along the sealed gunwales, repelled by the roof of the cabin and off the deck. But as the Bayesian was blown over by the fierce wind and rain, so the theory goes, seawater crashed down a recessed staircase on the deck and into the main cabin, with just a glass door to stop it. Guests on the boat, struggling to escape, would have seen a tsunami coming toward them.
Defenders of Perini Navi have pointed out that the Bayesian was designed to sail the world safely in almost any conditions, and that whatever hit it in the early morning hours of August 19 would have likely sunk many other yachts too. “A Perini vessel survived Hurricane Katrina,” Costantino told Corriere della Sera. “You don’t think it could survive a tornado like this?”
A Second Life
The tragedy at sea wasn’t the only fateful act to befall Autonomy’s chief officers. Two days before the sinking of the Bayesian, newly acquitted Stephen Chamberlain went jogging around 10 a.m. in Cambridgeshire and was struck by a blue Vauxhall Corsa. He was grievously injured and put on life support at a nearby hospital. It was his defense attorney, Lincenberg, who announced Chamberlain’s death, adding, “He was a courageous man with unparalleled integrity. We deeply miss him.”
Incredibly, he and Mike Lynch died on the same day. Online conspiracies proliferated questioning whether their deaths were more than just a bizarre and eerie coincidence, but police investigated and found no evidence of foul play.
Another lawsuit loomed over Lynch’s widow when a lawyer for the Italian Sea Group (T.I.S.G.) filed a suit which declared that Bacares and the boat’s crew were liable for the sinking of the Bayesian. T.I.S.G. would later withdraw the lawsuit.
Though Lynch was fully acquitted of wrongdoing, H.P. in England is still pursuing the damages won against Autonomy in 2022, going after Lynch’s grieving widow, Bacares, for the $4 billion awarded in damages, though the penalty may be reduced. When asked if H.P. will continue to go forward in its civil case, a spokesperson said to The Times of London, “We do not think it appropriate to comment on the ongoing legal matters in these tragic circumstances.”
One of the last people to interview Lynch was journalist Danny Fortson of The Sunday Times, seven weeks before Lynch’s death at sea. “It was to be his first big interview after his shock acquittal on 15 fraud charges brought by the US Department of Justice. It would be his last,” Fortson later wrote.
According to Fortson, Lynch “radiated a mix of incredulity at the many turns his life had taken, and an enthusiasm to re-engage fully with the things he loved—being a father, a husband, a mentor, a maths nerd deeply engaged in this AI era.” Lynch had big plans, including creating a British version of America’s Innocence Project to aid those unable to afford a legal defense, well aware that his own wealth had allowed him to ultimately prevail through “13 years of litigation, 16 million documents, three court cases, hundreds of millions of pounds in legal bills.” He was excited about the possibilities of A.I.; Darktrace was thriving, and Invoke Capital still needed looking after.
He wanted to win back his reputation, knowing that the acquittal in San Francisco was just the beginning. He felt he had been given a second life, and now he pondered what he should do with it. Tragically, Mike Lynch’s second life lasted only 74 days.
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
