Mike Lynch: The ‘British Bill Gates’ who loathed Silicon Valley

After a bank rebuffed his loan request early in his career, Mike Lynch persuaded a promoter for the band Genesis to stake him about $4,000 during a chance meeting at a pub. After being snubbed by the London Stock Exchange, he listed his tech company in Brussels, sold it for $11 billion to Hewlett Packard—and then spent more than a decade fighting allegations that he fraudulently inflated its value.

That chapter of his life wound down in June, when Lynch was acquitted in a criminal trial brought by the Justice Department in San Francisco.

But two months later, Lynch and five others are missing after a freak storm capsized the yacht he was on as it was anchored near the Italian island of Sicily. One of Lynch’s daughters, a Morgan Stanley executive and a former U.S. prosecutor are also among the missing. Lynch’s wife is among the survivors rescued on Monday.

The Italian Coast Guard was continuing the search Tuesday morning.

Michael Richard Lynch was born in Ireland and raised in Ilford, on the outskirts of London. His mom was an intensive-care nurse, his dad a firefighter. “My father advised against following him, earning a living running into burning buildings," he told an interviewer in 2000.

Lynch attended private school on a scholarship before studying at the University of Cambridge. He stayed there to get his Ph.D. in engineering, focusing on the studies of 18th-century minister Thomas Bayes. Some researchers say Bayes wanted to prove God’s existence through mathematics.

“He never succeeded," Lynch said in 2009, “although he probably has an answer by now."

Some of the minister’s research, now known as Bayesian inference, would eventually underpin the technology that earned the entrepreneur his fortune.

But first, Lynch needed a loan.

It wasn’t coming from a bank manager, who told him to come back when he was older and had more experience, Lynch said in 2000. So instead, he turned to a person whom he has described as an eccentric pop-music promoter he encountered at a pub in London’s Soho neighborhood.

“He’d never met me before, but he lent me £2,000 on the spot," Lynch said.

With the funds, he bought a secondhand computer and designed a machine to help police match fingerprints. Out of that business eventually grew his most famous company, Autonomy, which used Bayesian inference to sift through mountains of data and present the most relevant information to a person.

With Autonomy’s stock soaring in 2000, Lynch became the U.K.’s first internet billionaire and national media dubbed him the British answer to Bill Gates.

The James Bond aficionado ran the company from its Cambridge headquarters, which had 007-inspired names for meeting rooms such as “Goldfinger." He decompressed by tinkering with the miniature steam engine and train set in his garden, driving an Aston Martin DB5 and caring for rare animals at his home in Suffolk, England.

“I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one’s kept since medieval times," he said in an interview.

In a 2000 interview, he said he spent half his time in the company’s office in San Francisco, where he learned to hate Silicon Valley culture. “You could turn up with a working time machine and be ignored unless you have got the right person on board," he said.

He said he and his friends invented a game for Silicon Valley parties, where they would spread a rumor about an amazing but fictional startup and wait to see how long the rumor returned to them via cocktail chatter.

It was also Silicon Valley that gave him a windfall. In 2011, he sold Autonomy to Hewlett Packard for $11.1 billion, one of the biggest acquisitions at the time for both HP and the U.K. tech sector.

But a year later, in 2012, HP took an $8.8 billion write down related to the deal, not long after Meg Whitman took over as CEO. The company said that an internal investigation found “serious accounting improprieties" and “outright misrepresentations" in connection with Autonomy.

That began a series of civil and criminal cases for Lynch and other Autonomy executives. Lynch’s lawyers said “there was no conspiracy at Autonomy" and that Hewlett Packard “has a long history of failed acquisitions" and was trying to blame Autonomy for its own errors.

A U.S. federal jury in 2018 found Autonomy’s former chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, guilty of falsifying financial statements and exaggerating Autonomy’s value before the acquisition. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

A British judge in 2022 ruled that Lynch had duped HP into overpaying for Autonomy, and a year later he was escorted by U.S. Marshals on an extradition flight to San Francisco. A judge ordered Lynch, who according to his lawyers had a net worth of between $400 million and $450 million, to be placed under house arrest.

Thirteen months after his extradition, Lynch was acquitted on all 15 counts in June. “I am looking forward to returning to the U.K. and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field," he said at the time.

After selling Autonomy, Lynch focused on his venture-capital firm, Invoke Capital. It invested in European tech companies including Darktrace, a cybersecurity company that is among the most prominent in England’s tech sector.

In an interview with the Sunday Times several weeks after his acquittal, Lynch said he feared he would die in prison and that he planned to fund a U.K. version of the Innocence Project, the U.S. organization that works on behalf of those who believe they are wrongfully accused of serious crimes.

The yacht where the entrepreneur might have spent his final moments was named Bayesian, sharing the moniker with the work of a mathematician minister who inspired Lynch’s career.

Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com