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.
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
Alongside founding Autonomy, Lynch also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups. He founded Invoke in 2012.
He became a key voice supporting the U.K. technology industry, backing key names like cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal tech firm Luminance.
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.
UnitedHealth Group saw some of its insiders step in and purchase declining shares this week.
Kristen Gil, a director at the firm, bought 3,700 shares worth roughly $1 million on Thursday.
Shares of UnitedHealth plunged nearly 11% to $274.35 on Thursday following a report in The Wall Street Journal that the Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation into possible Medicare fraud.
UnitedHealth Group , whose stock has been in a tailspin amid a tumultuous period for the health-care giant, saw some of its insiders step in and purchase declining shares this week. Kristen Gil, a director at the firm, bought 3,700 shares worth roughly $1 million on Thursday, while Timothy Patrick Flynn and John Noseworthy, also directors, scooped up about 1,500 and 300 shares , respectively, on Wednesday, according to InsiderScore, which tracks regulatory filings from corporate insiders. Shares of UnitedHealth plunged nearly 11% to $274.35 on Thursday following a report in The Wall Street Journal that the Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation into possible Medicare fraud. The stock rebounded 6% Friday, cutting its weekly losses to 23%. UNH 5D mountain UnitedHealth The reported investigation also follows the surprise exit of UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty, who will be replaced by the company’s former longtime chief executive Stephen Hemsley. Shares of UnitedHealth Group are down roughly 43% this year following a string of setbacks for the company. The company has been grappling with a historic cyberattack, higher-than-expected medical costs and a torrent of public blowback after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
U.S. Federal Reserve in Washington, DC, on January 30, 2024.
Mandel Ngan | Afp | Getty Images
The Federal Reserve will look to reduce its headcount by 10% over the next couple of years, including offering deferred resignation to some older employees, central bank chair Jerome Powell said in a memo.
“Experience here and elsewhere shows that it is healthy for any organization to periodically take a fresh look at its staffing and resources. The Fed has done that from time to time as our work, priorities, or external environment have changed,” Powell said in a memo obtained by CNBC.
The central bank chief added that he has instructed leaders throughout the Fed “to find incremental ways to consolidate functions where appropriate, modernize some business practices, and ensure that we are right-sized and able to meet our statutory mission.” One method for shrinking the staff will be to offer a voluntary deferred resignation program to employees of the Federal Reserve Board who would be fully eligible to retire at the end of 2027.
The central bank said in its 2023 annual report that it had just under 24,000 employees. A 10% reduction would bring that number below 22,000.
The memo comes as the Trump administration has pushed for cost cuts across civil service agencies, spearheaded by Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk has previously called the Fed “absurdly overstaffed.” Powell’s memo did not mention Musk or DOGE as a factor in the decision to shrink headcount.
The planned staff cuts were first reported by Bloomberg News.
Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading. Applied Materials — Shares of the semiconductor manufacturer dropped 6% after Applied Materials posted disappointing fiscal second-quarter revenue. The company’s revenue of $7.10 billion was below the LSEG consensus of $7.13 billion. Semiconductor revenue of $5.26 billion also disappointed the $5.31 billion analysts were looking for. Take-Two Interactive Software — The stock slid 1.8% after the video game company gave weaker-than-anticipated guidance for full-year bookings, expecting the figure to come between $5.9 billion and $6 billion. That missed the $7.82 billion StreetAccount consensus. Take-Two also projected bookings of between $1.25 billion and $1.30 billion for the current quarter, while analysts had penciled in $1.28 billion. Vistra — Shares of the power producer gained 3% after the company purchased seven natural gas facilities from Lotus Infrastructure Partners for $1.9 billion. The gas plants are located in the PJM market, New England, New York and California. Constellation Brands — Shares of the Corona and Modelo importer climbed 1.4% after Berkshire Hathaway disclosed doubling its stake in the company, putting its position at around $2.2 billion in value. Galaxy Digital — The Mike Novogratz-led crypto firm began trading at the Nasdaq on Friday, opening at $23.50 per share in a direct listing. Galaxy Digital has traded in Canada since 2020 . Cava — The eatery chain’s stock dropped more than 2% after the company reiterated its full-year guidance for same restaurant sales, implying a slowdown from first-quarter results. Cava said it achieved 10.8% same store sales growth. However, it maintained a full-year projection of 6% to 8% improvement in that category. Cava’s earnings per share of 22 cents for the period was ahead of projections for 14 cents per share, according to LSEG. Fiserv — The financial services provider jumped more than 4% as the stock recovered some of its steep losses for the week. Fiserv is down more than 9% this week and is one of the most oversold names on Wall Street, with a relative strength index below 30. Coinbase — The crypto exchange jumped more than 9%, recovering losses from the previous session. Some Wall Street analysts called the sell-off overdone and a buying opportunity . On Thursday, the company confirmed the Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating whether it has misstated its user numbers , sending the stock down 7.2%. Novo Nordisk — Shares stumbled 3% after the pharmaceutical company announced that CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen would be stepping down from his position , citing recent market challenges. Jørgensen, who was in the position for the last eight years, will remain “for a period to support a smooth transition to new leadership” as Novo Nordisk searches for a successor. Doximity — The health care platform issued weak guidance, sending the stock down 11.8%. Doximity expects adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter to come in between $71 million and $72 million. That’s short of the $74 million expected from analysts polled by StreetAccount. Revenue guidance for both the first quarter and full year also missed expectations. — CNBC’s Tanaya Macheel, Lisa Han, Jesse Pound and Michelle Fox contributed reporting.
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