Superyacht Tragedy

One of the world’s smartest men, British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, who’d often been dubbed the ‘British Bill Gates’, died tragically late August alongside his 18-year-old daughter Hannah Lynch when their superyacht, the Bayesian, was sunk by a violent tornado along the Sicilian coast off Italy.

Mike Lynch was a uniquely talented visionary with a PhD from Cambridge in Mathematics. He became a highly successful entrepreneur and talented organization builder. The celebratory occasion on the yacht followed the end of Lynch’s protracted legal battle in the US which started when Hewlett-Packard, the technology company, accused him of fraud by overstating the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to them in 2011. The trial saw Lynch extradited to the US to serve a year under house arrest in San Francisco. He was eventually acquitted of all charges and hence his celebration with family and friends aboard the Bayesian. Amongst the dead from the yacht’s sinking was the chairman of Morgan Stanley Bank International, Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy.

Just 48 hours before this nautical tragedy, Lynch’s former business partner and co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, was fatally hit by a car while he was out jogging in his hometown of Cambridgeshire, England. It’s an inconceivable amount of unlikely tragedy that has befallen these families in 2024.