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Mike Lynch, man once dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates,’ dies at age 59

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Mike Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He was acquitted of fraud charges in June after defending himself in a trial over allegations that he artificially inflated Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale to tech giant Hewlett Packard.

Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images

LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59 years old.

Just two months ago, Lynch won a stunning victory in a landmark U.S. trial over allegations from Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to the U.S. enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.

Fears for Lynch’s life swirled earlier this week when he was reported missing after the sinking of a yacht — later confirmed as owned by his wife Angela Bacares — off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the province of Palermo in Italy.

Bacares was one of 15 people rescued rescued following the yacht’s collapse earlier this week.

The anchored vessel, a 56-meter (184 feet) sailing yacht named the Bayesian, was hit by a violent storm early Monday morning.

Witnesses told local media the anchored boat, which was carrying 10 crew members and 12 passengers, descended rapidly after its mast broke.

Lynch’s body was retrieved from the wreckage of the yacht Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC Thursday. His daughter, Hannah, remains unaccounted for, according to the source, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the situation. Sky News earlier reported the news.

‘Britain’s Bill Gates’

Born in Ilford, a large town in East London, to Irish parents in 1965, Lynch grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman.

Lynch had a modest upbringing but, at the age of 11, he was awarded a scholarship to attend Bancroft’s School, a private school in Woodford Green, East London.

Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, speaks at a Confederation of British Industry conference in London, U.K., in 2003.

Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images

From Bancroft’s, he attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas including electronics, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signals processing and communications.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a firm which produced designs and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted the South Yorkshire Police among its customers.

But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company scaled into one of Britain’s biggest tech firms.

Autonomy’s software, made up of pattern-matching algorithms, was touted as a solution that could help employees abstract meaning from unstructured data, including web pages, email, video, audio, and text.

These pattern recognition techniques were based on so-called Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference named after a theorem developed by 18th century statistician Thomas Bayes.

Lynch’s luxury yacht, the Bayesian, was named after this mathematical model.

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch poses at the company’s then-offices near Cambridge, U.K, on Thursday, July 19, 2007.

Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images

After the sale of his company to HP, Lynch became known by U.K. national media as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” serving as a rare example of a U.K. businessman who successfully built and scaled a globally significant tech business selling into various markets around the world.

Legal battle with HP

However, Lynch’s reputation would go on to take a hit after the deal with HP took a turn for the worse. In 2012, HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy — just a year after buying it.

Lynch soon became the target of a protracted legal battle with the U.S. tech giant, with HP suing Lynch for $5 billion in damages over accusations that Lynch had inflated Autonomy’s sales by about $700 million.

Lynch, who had long denied the allegations, was extradited from Britain to the U.S. in 2023 to stand trial over the HP allegations.

This came despite pressure on the U.K. government from Lynch’s supporters not to allow his extradition.

U.S. prosecutors had filed criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy for an alleged scheme to inflate Autonomy’s revenue starting in 2009, partly to entice a buyer.

However, in a stunning victory in June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges following trial. The trial lasted three months.

Mike Lynch leaves the Rolls Building in London following the civil case over his £8.4 billion sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Picture date: Monday March 25, 2019.

Dominic Lipinski | PA Images | Getty Images

During the course of the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense. He denied wrongdoing and told jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.

Prosecutors had alleged Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased finance executive Stephen Chamberlain, who also died in a tragic car crash Saturday, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.

These included back-dated agreements, concealing the firm’s loss-making business by reselling hardware, and intimidating or paying off individuals who had raised concerns.

However, Lynch told jurors he had focused on tech-related matters at Autonomy, not finances.

Accounting and money decisions were left to Autonomy’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, he said.

Hussain was separately convicted in the U.S. in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.

Lynch’s influence on UK tech

Publicly listed Darktrace, which had fended off similar allegations of inflating its revenue by U.S. short seller Quintessential Capital Management, earlier this year agreed to a deal to be bought out and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.

Lynch was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC, and once also served as an advisor to the U.K. government on the Council for Science and Technology.

In 2014 and 2015, he made the Forbes’ billionaires list, with an estimate net worth of $1 billion. However, while facing legal costs amid his dispute with HP, he dropped off that list in 2016.

Legal struggles aside, Lynch had several hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

Mike Lynch, founder of software firm Autonomy, at the company’s headquarters in, Cambridge, U.K., Aug. 24,  2000.

Bryn Colton | Hulton Archive | Getty Images

“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in a 2016 interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the medieval times and none of them have any Apple products whatsoever.”

Prior to his passing, Lynch had reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in the east of England, to recover from his U.S. legal battle, the local East Anglian Times newspaper reported.

Just weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper of how he feared dying in prison if found guilty over the HP allegations.

“‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch said in the interview with The Times.

“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.

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Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

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Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: TSLA, DJT, AMZN, RIVN

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