Former major figure of Silicon Valley, the English entrepreneur is among those missing from the shipwreck off the coast of Sicily, which has resulted in at least one death.
On the night of August 18 to 19, 2024, a 56-meter sailing yacht capsized due to a waterspout. The provisional toll as of this Monday reports one dead and six missing, including the English entrepreneur Mike Lynch.
According to information from AFP, the “super yacht” broke down in Porticello, off Palermo in Sicily, while at anchor. It reportedly sank after a violent storm around 5 am and is located 50 meters deep, according to the Italian media Palermo Today.
Mike Lynch still missing
22 people were on board, including 12 passengers and 10 crew members. Mike Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, has been rescued, but her husband remains missing.
“Our priority is to cooperate with the ongoing search efforts and to provide any necessary support to the surviving passengers and crew members,” ensured the yacht’s British owner, Camper & Nicholsons, in a statement.
On Monday, the sun returned, allowing rescuers to conduct searches in calm seas involving a helicopter and divers around the wreckage of the boat, located at a depth of 50 m.
A former figure in Silicon Valley, Mike Lynch co-founded Autonomy Corporation, a company dedicated to research on automation, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11 billion.
The “British Bill Gates”
The acquisition generated significant attention due to fraud allegations from HP, of which he was acquitted in June 2024 after being extradited to the United States in 2022. The company accused Mike Lynch of artificially inflating reported revenues, as well as growth and margins.
At the same time, he was a government advisor within the Council for Science and Technology in the UK.
Mike Lynch was also one of the founders of Darktrace, a powerful British cybersecurity company created through a venture capital firm, Invoke Capital.
Nicknamed the “British Bill Gates,” Mike Lynch announced on August 1, 2024, to the BBC his desire to re-enter the tech field after becoming interested in artificial intelligence and its use in a legal context: “I want to return to what I love doing, which is innovating.”