The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: an ‘excellent, meticulously researched’ biography

“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.

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.