I knew the battle between Hewlett-Packard (H.P.) and Mike Lynch was a hate-filled conflict. But I had not realized how much writing a book about the life of the U.K.’s first dot-com billionaire would be like lancing pus-filled boils—or how much willful blindness was involved on all sides. As one British investor told me, “You’ll find it’s like lifting up a rock and finding all sorts of nasty things underneath.” He wasn’t wrong.
When I first started researching my book, in 2024, the famously irascible 59-year-old was still alive. At that point in my writing, Lynch had been accused of fraud in the 2011 sale of his corporate-software company, Autonomy, to H.P., and was on house arrest while awaiting a criminal trial in San Francisco, where he faced the possibility of two decades in jail.
