“Mike Lynch was the UK’s answer to the truculent titans of California’s Silicon Valley,” said Martin Vander Weyer in Literary Review. An “authentic tech genius turned billionaire”, he had many “rebarbative traits to match” – not least a tendency to bully staff.
Today, Lynch is known above all for the freak accident that ended his life in August 2024, 10 weeks after he was cleared of fraud by a court in San Francisco. As he celebrated with friends and family, his superyacht Bayesian was struck by a tornado, which toppled its 72-metre mast and drowned Lynch and six others, including his daughter Hannah.
Now Katie Prescott, a Times journalist, has written this engaging biography, which examines “with exemplary fairness and clarity” Lynch’s life and business dealings, along with his “terrible” end.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Born in 1965 in the “rough suburb” of Ilford, east London, Lynch was “blessed with brains, musical talent and drive”, said Charlie English in The Guardian. He earned a PhD in computing at Cambridge and in 1996 launched Autonomy, the software company that made him famous. Four years later, it floated on the London Stock Exchange with an “astonishing valuation of £4.1 billion”, and in 2011 was bought by Hewlett-Packard for an even more remarkable $11.7 billion.
As Prescott makes clear, these valuations were artificially inflated: Autonomy deployed various tricks to overstate its revenues – tricks, she suggests, that Lynch must have known about.
He emerges from her account as a “monstrous man in many ways”: a “fluent liar” who set out to create a “sinister corporate culture” (at one of his companies, meeting rooms were “named after Bond villains”). This is an “excellent, meticulously researched” biography of a “gifted”, flawed and – in the end – desperately unlucky man.
-
Hong Kong jails democracy advocate Jimmy LaiSpeed Read The former media tycoon was sentenced to 20 years in prison
-
Japan’s Takaichi cements power with snap election winSpeed Read President Donald Trump congratulated the conservative prime minister
-
Seahawks trounce Patriots in Super Bowl LXSpeed Read The Seattle Seahawks won their second Super Bowl against the New England Patriots
-
6 gorgeous homes in warm climesFeature Featuring a Spanish Revival in Tucson and Richard Neutra-designed modernist home in Los Angeles
-
Touring the vineyards of southern BoliviaThe Week Recommends Strongly reminiscent of Andalusia, these vineyards cut deep into the country’s southwest
-
Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – an ‘engrossing’ exhibitionThe Week Recommends All 126 images from the American photographer’s ‘influential’ photobook have come to the UK for the first time
-
American Psycho: a ‘hypnotic’ adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis classicThe Week Recommends Rupert Goold’s musical has ‘demonic razzle dazzle’ in spades
-
Properties of the week: houses near spectacular coastal walksThe Week Recommends Featuring homes in Cornwall, Devon and Northumberland
-
Melania: an ‘ice-cold’ documentaryTalking Point The film has played to largely empty cinemas, but it does have one fan
-
Nouvelle Vague: ‘a film of great passion’The Week Recommends Richard Linklater’s homage to the French New Wave
-
Wonder Man: a ‘rare morsel of actual substance’ in the Marvel UniverseThe Week Recommends A Marvel series that hasn’t much to do with superheroes
