TBritish tycoon Mike Lynch, one of six people missing from a sunken yacht off Sicily, had been trying to put behind him the Silicon Valley debacle that had tarnished his reputation as an icon of British ingenuity.
Lynch, 59, hit the jackpot when he sold Autonomy, the software maker he founded in 1996, to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. But the deal quickly became a burden for him after he was accused of cooking the books to facilitate the sale.
The fraud allegations led to Lynch being fired by HP’s then-CEO Meg Whitman and a decade-long legal battle that culminated in his extradition from Britain to face charges of plotting a massive fraud against a company that shaped the Silicon Valley zeitgeist after it was founded in a Palo Alto, California, garage in 1939.
Lynch has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and claimed he was being made a scapegoat for HP’s own bungling – a position he maintained when testifying before a jury during a two-and-a-half-month trial in San Francisco earlier this year. U.S. Justice Department prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses to prove allegations that Lynch was guilty of accounting duplication and defrauded HP of billions of dollars.
The trial ended with Lynch being acquitted of all charges in June. Lynch, who remained free on $100 million bail during the trial, had promised to return to Britain and explore new avenues of innovation.
Although he avoided possible prison time, Lynch still faced a potentially large bill from a civil case in London, which HP largely won in 2022. Damages in that case have not yet been determined, but HP is seeking $4 billion. Lynch earned more than $800 million from the sale of Autonomy.
Before joining HP, Lynch was widely hailed as a visionary who inspired descriptions that portrayed him as a British version of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Lynch, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, made his name running Autonomy, which developed a search engine that could sift through emails and other internal business documents to help companies find important information faster. Autonomy’s steady growth over its first decade earned Lynch one of Britain’s highest honors in 2006: the Office of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
In the months before the collapsed deal, HP valued Autonomy at $46 billion, according to evidence presented in the trial against Lynch.
The trial also painted different portraits of Lynch. Prosecutors painted him as an iron-fisted boss obsessed with hitting sales targets, even if it meant resorting to duplicity. His lawyers, on the other hand, portrayed him as an entrepreneur with integrity and a prototypical techie who enjoyed eating cold pizza late at night while thinking of new ways to innovate.
