The Story of British Billionaire Mike Lynch's Tragic Boat Sinking

The last night of tech mogul Mike Lynch's life has become fodder for conspiracy theories. For the first time, the whole story can be told. In the predawn hours of August 19, 2024, bolts of lightning began to fork through the purple-black clouds above the Mediterranean. From the rail of a 184-foot vessel, a 22-year-old named Matthew Griffiths took out his phone to record a video. The British deckhand was just a week and a half into his first official yacht job, and he wasn't on just any boat. The yacht, the $40 million, was a star of the superyacht world, considered to be a feat of minimal design and precision engineering. As thunder rolled toward the anchored vessel, Griffiths set the video to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" and posted it to Instagram. In the video, the's aluminum mast, one of the tallest in the world, is briefly visible against the roiling sky. Below deck, the yacht's owner, Michael Lynch, had every reason to be sleeping soundly. The boat trip had been organized as a celebration. Months earlier, Lynch had walked out of a San Francisco federal courthouse a free man, acquitted of all charges in one of the largest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history. Lynch had built his fortune on understanding probability, on turning the unlikely into the possible. He had named his yacht in honor of the statistical theorem that made him a billionaire, after the sale, in 2011, of his company Autonomy. The British tech giant sold software that could find meaningful signals amid the flood of unstructured data in emails, videos, and phone calls, but it would be better known as the company that allegedly defrauded, and nearly destroyed, Hewlett-Packard. The cabins aboard the contained the people who had stood by Lynch through his 13-year-long legal ordeal. Beside him in the master suite was his wife of 22 years, Angela Bacares, a former vice president in the investment division of Deutsche Bank who had caught his eye while working an Autonomy deal. Other cabins housed the Clifford Chance attorneys who had orchestrated Lynch's legal victory, as well as longtime colleagues, their partners, and a 1-year-old baby, all supported by 10 crew members. Also onboard was Lynch's younger daughter, Hannah, 18, who was about to begin her studies at Oxford.