This is a bit weird....
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So, a couple of days ago super-yacht sunk off the coast of Sicily. Among the people apparently lost is British tech tycoon, Mike Lynch, who was recently acquitted in multiple fraud charges. Also missing is the chairman of Morgan Stanley. He appeared as a witness for Mr. Lynch.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgky36j1d3go
Now, the weird bit. On the same day, his co-defendant in the fraud case, who was also acquitted, was killed after being struck by a car while out jogging.
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Apparently, they pissed off the wrong people.
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@Jolly said in This is a bit weird....:
Apparently, they pissed off the wrong people.
Certainly it's possible, but the water-spout is actually a pretty believable occurrence, and the driver in the other death stayed at the scene.
We shall see...
I was only joking
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@Jolly said in This is a bit weird....:
Apparently, they pissed off the wrong people.
Certainly it's possible, but the water-spout is actually a pretty believable occurrence, and the driver in the other death stayed at the scene.
We shall see...
@Doctor-Phibes said in This is a bit weird....:
@Jolly said in This is a bit weird....:
Apparently, they pissed off the wrong people.
Certainly it's possible, but the water-spout is actually a pretty believable occurrence, and the driver in the other death stayed at the scene.
We shall see...
I think it is true. From what I have hear, the boat was either in dock or near dock and nearby boats were a witness to what happened.
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What a horrible way to die. :eek
Initial examinations of four of the people killed when British tech tycoon Mike Lynch's family yacht sank off Sicily last month indicated they had died of suffocation as oxygen ran out on the stricken vessel, judicial sources said on Thursday.
The bodies of the dead, except for the cook, were found in the cabins on the left-hand side of the boat, where the passengers may have tried to search for remaining bubbles of air, the head of Palermo's Fire Brigade said last month.
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https://www.wired.com/story/mike-lynch-sinking-disaster/
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.
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Here is the whole thing. Sorry, no pictures. Broken into two parts as original is too long.
I. The Storm
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 Bayesian, 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. It was 3:55 am.
In the video, the Bayesian’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 Bayesian 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 Bayesian 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. Her older sister, Esme, 22, had remained in London.
The day before, their last of the trip, the group had been subdued. They had spent the afternoon in the laid-back coastal town of Cefalù, wandering the plaza and visiting the church. That night, they had gathered for dinner in the saloon of the Bayesian, followed by dessert and drinks on the upper deck. Everyone was in bed by 12:30 am. Water taxis were due early the next morning to take them to Palermo for their flights home.
Many of them would not make it. Griffiths’ video was to be the final earthly record of the Bayesian. Two minutes after he posted it, wind and rain started to buffet the vessel, and the young deckhand hurried to close forward hatches and cockpit windows. At 4 am, he ran down the stairs to wake the captain. This is the first time that details of Griffiths’ account, as well as those of many associates of Lynch, are being shared—WIRED interviewed dozens of friends and colleagues of Lynch, reviewed thousands of pages of court documents, and reconstructed events on the Bayesian based on accounts, yacht GPS data, and official investigative reports. The Bayesian and its human cargo were about to face forces that would test every calculation of the yacht’s design, the terrifying and tragic culmination of a series of highly improbable events. To this day, mystery surrounds the final night of Lynch’s life, making room for conspiracy theories about spies and secret hard drives that can’t seem to be quashed.
II. The Revelation
Today, Bayesian analysis is everywhere—powering spam filters, search engines, medical diagnoses, and artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley engineers casually talk about “updating their priors” as they refine machine-learning models. But in the 1980s, when Mike Lynch was a PhD student at Cambridge, Bayesian inference was still fighting for respectability, dismissed by many statisticians as unscientific because it dared to incorporate earlier beliefs into its calculations.
Lynch had arrived at Cambridge in 1983 to study natural sciences, carrying with him the determination of someone who had started life in the red—minus £4, to be exact, the amount his Irish immigrant parents owed the bank after they got married. His father was a fireman from Cork, his mother a nurse from Tipperary. Growing up in 1970s London as an Irish boy meant learning to navigate prejudice during the height of the IRA bombings. “You had to learn to run fast,” he would later say, “but reading the room is a good thing to have as a skill.”
He had won a scholarship to Bancroft’s School—money bequeathed in the 1700s for the education of “poor boys”—and spent three hours a day commuting to Woodford Green, often hitchhiking and listening to drivers talk about their lives. On weekends, he practiced clarinet and saxophone and worked at his mother’s hospital, progressing from mopping floors to serving tea to patients. It was there, talking to the dying, that he learned a fundamental lesson: “Get on with it. Do stuff. Whatever it is you want to do, just do it.”
Lynch’s path to corporate software began at a distant remove—he wanted to build a digital music synthesizer. (It was the ’80s, after all.) Samplers like the Fairlight CMI cost around £18,000 to £30,000. So Lynch, who had been tinkering with electronics since childhood and tried starting bands, created a groundbreaking program for the Atari ST computer that could manipulate sound with “an accuracy of one sample—that’s one 50,000th of a second,” according to a 1988 interview with Sound on Sound magazine. The software gave musicians capabilities that were normally out of reach at the time. These technical obsessions led Lynch to Peter Rayner’s signal processing group at Cambridge, in the engineering department. Lynch had switched from natural sciences to electrical sciences in his third year. “I initially thought he was a bit lazy,” Rayner told me, recalling how Lynch often hadn’t done the assigned work. “But when we worked through problems in supervision, he showed great insight and came up with sometimes incorrect approaches, but often very interesting ones.” Rayner’s lab had a distinctly commercial bent, focused on solving real-world problems. Many of his roughly 100 PhD students went on to found companies, becoming, he said, full professors, multimillionaires, and even one billionaire—Lynch.
At Cambridge, Lynch discovered that the same mathematics he was using to clean up audio samples could be applied to any kind of noisy data. At the heart of this approach was Bayesian inference, a way of thinking about probability that had been developed by Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister in the 1700s who died before publishing his findings. They were discovered by a friend who happened upon them when cleaning out Bayes’ things.
To the outside world, Mike Lynch appeared to be exactly what Europe needed: a homegrown technology champion who could compete with Silicon Valley.
The power of Bayesian thinking lies in how it handles uncertainty. As Rayner explained to me, using a simple example: “If I gave you a coin and you tossed it and it came down heads, then all you could say based on that one experiment is the probability of tossing a head is 1—certain. But Bayes would say, ‘Come on, we know it’s going to be around a half.’ It allows you to take account of previous knowledge.”
This idea, of starting with prior assumptions and updating them with new evidence, seems simple, but Bayesian methods proved extremely effective at pattern recognition in the age of computers. Lynch’s doctoral thesis, completed in 1990, applied these techniques to neural networks for pattern classification—“a small step along the road” to modern AI, as Rayner put it. But Lynch saw commercial potential where others saw only academic interest. While supposedly working as a postdoc, he was often absent from the lab, secretly raising money for his first company. “Later on, I said to him, ‘Why on earth didn’t you come to me, Mike?’” Rayner recalled. “He said, ‘I didn’t want you to know!’”
That company was Cambridge Neurodynamics, founded after he completed his PhD, and its flagship product was a fingerprint recognition system that could handle smudged or partial prints. After Cambridge Neurodynamics, Lynch founded Autonomy. The new company would take the same ideas even further, applying them to the explosion of unstructured data that businesses were generating but couldn’t effectively search or analyze.
The company’s breakthrough was IDOL—Intelligent Data Operating Layer—a pattern-recognition engine that could understand the actual meaning within human-generated information. Unlike keyword searches that might confuse different terminology, IDOL could recognize that a document about “automobiles” was relevant to a search for “cars.” It could identify concepts, find patterns, and extract meaning from chaos. The name Autonomy itself reflected Lynch’s vision: software intelligent enough to operate independently, to make its own guesses about meaning and relevance without human intervention. As Lynch would later explain in a 2000 interview with WIRED, “Bayes gave us a key to a secret garden. A lot of people have opened up the gate, looked at the first row of roses, said, ‘That’s very nice,’ and shut the gate. They don’t realize there’s a whole new country stretching out behind those roses.”
Illustration: Anthony Gerace
III. The EmpireLynch had always been more interested in how people thought than what they knew. I talked to one of his employees, Emily Orton, who still remembers her first interview with Lynch back in 2009. While other executives had asked about her qualifications and experience, Lynch wanted to see how she dealt with the unexpected. He asked her a single question: “Tell me what makes you angry?”
By that point, Autonomy was Britain’s largest software company. Its software was being used by intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and major corporations worldwide, and its acquisition, in 2005, of Verity—a search company double Autonomy’s size in terms of sales—eventually led to a market value north of $6 billion. Lynch earned the nickname “Britain’s Bill Gates.”
Andy Kanter, an American lawyer at Autonomy since the late ’90s, had watched Lynch evolve from entrepreneur to CEO of a major corporation. He was a perfectionist, says Kanter. When Kanter and a colleague spent weeks crafting the IPO prospectus, Lynch read it, declared it “entirely wrong,” then approved it after they changed perhaps 10 words. “If something wasn’t right, he would dismiss it as useless,” Kanter said. “Ninety-five percent good isn’t good enough.”
But this harshness—one of his own lawyers told me that “he could be a prick”—came with fierce loyalty. For Christmas parties, Lynch flew the entire UK staff to four-star hotels in European cities—Venice, Prague. And quarter after quarter, the company continued to beat analyst expectations. To the outside world, Autonomy appeared to be exactly what Europe needed: a homegrown technology champion that could compete with Silicon Valley.
But maintaining Autonomy’s image of consistent growth required increasingly creative measures. At the center of this effort was Sushovan Hussain, the CFO who had joined in 2001. Lynch and Hussain’s relationship went back to their school days—though Lynch would later downplay this, testifying that Hussain was merely a “third-level acquaintance” who had arrived at Bancroft’s in his final year. Yet they had both gone on to Cambridge and kept in touch over the years, and Lynch had attended Hussain’s wedding. When Hussain returned to England after working in the oil industry abroad, Lynch hired him.
Software companies are judged differently than other businesses. Investors expect them to maintain high profit margins, because software costs almost nothing to reproduce—once you write the code, you can sell it infinitely without manufacturing costs. But, inevitably, some quarters fall short. So Lynch and Hussain developed practices designed to smooth out the randomness.
The Autonomy acquisition, meant to herald HP’s transformation, instead became the symbol of a company in chaos.
The most straightforward was hardware reselling. When software sales fell short, Autonomy would purchase servers from manufacturers like EMC, Dell, and Hitachi, then resell them to customers—often at a loss. This wasn’t unusual; many software companies bundled hardware with their products. What was distinctive, according to later court findings, was how Autonomy accounted for these transactions. Instead of recording all the hardware costs as “cost of goods sold,” which would have devastated those crucial gross margins, portions were allocated to “sales and marketing expenses.” This preserved the illusion of a pure software company while pumping up revenue. The company also developed complex, opportunistic arrangements with resellers. During analyst calls, when hedge funds would try to trip up Hussain with coordinated questions about the numbers, Lynch would protect, and at times coach, his CFO.
So business stayed booming, and Lynch lived the life of a quirky multimillionaire. He had moved his family to a sprawling 69-acre farm he owned in Suffolk, complete with gardens, parkland, paddocks, and woodland. He restored a water mill and began breeding rare animals—“cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one’s kept since medieval times,” as he would later describe them. He loved dogs, especially the rare Otter Hound. His dogs were all named after engineering parts: Switch, Tappet, Pinion, Valve, and Cam.
Politicians sought out his advice for Britain’s technological future, and he was a popular speaker at events and in the business media. Everything Lynch touched, it seemed, turned to gold.
IV. The Hail Mary
Leo Apotheker had been CEO of Hewlett-Packard for less than a year when he announced his vision to transform the technology giant: It was time for HP to pivot from its roots in hardware manufacturing to become a software and services company. It was March 2011, and Apotheker needed a flagship acquisition to demonstrate this new direction. By July, Lynch and Apotheker were meeting in Deauville, the French seaside resort.
HP initially proposed acquiring Autonomy for between £24.94 and £26.94 per share in late July 2011. When market volatility drove down Autonomy’s stock price in early August, HP attempted to renegotiate lower, but Lynch held firm, refusing to accept anything below £25. Within weeks of that first proposal, the companies settled on £25.50 per share—approximately $11.1 billion total, a 64 percent premium over Autonomy’s market value. HP’s due diligence was, as Andy Kanter would later describe it, shocking in its brevity: “Having run billions and billions of dollars of acquisitions,” he told me, “I’d never seen anything like it.” The exact duration would become a matter of dispute—Lynch’s lawyers would claim it amounted to just six hours in conference calls, while HP described hundreds of people involved and consultations with Deloitte, Autonomy’s auditor.
On August 18, 2011, HP put out what Kanter called “some of the five craziest corporate things all at the same time.” In a single press release, the company announced the Autonomy acquisition, revealed it had missed its numbers, lowered guidance, wrote off previous acquisitions, and disclosed plans to potentially split the company and exit the PC business. The stock price plummeted. The Autonomy acquisition, meant to herald HP’s transformation, instead became the symbol of a company in chaos.
HP’s board, watching their share price crater, seemed to panic. About a month after the announcement—before the deal had even closed—they fired Apotheker and replaced him with Meg Whitman. The acquisition closed in October, but by then Autonomy had already become, in Lynch’s words, “the unwanted stepchild.” By May 2012, Whitman fired Lynch and reshuffled most of Autonomy’s senior leadership. Six months later, HP was writing down $8.8 billion of Autonomy’s value, with $5 billion attributed to what it called “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy.
From Lynch’s perspective, the narrative was clear: HP had thrown a Hail Mary, the market had punished the company for it, and now it needed someone to blame. HP saw it differently. In its telling, it had been systematically deceived, the victim of a sophisticated fraud that had inflated Autonomy’s value. The battle lines were drawn. HP sued Lynch in the UK for $5 billion. The US Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation. Lynch countersued, claiming HP had destroyed his reputation and mismanaged the acquisition. What had begun as a transformative deal had become one of the most bitter corporate disputes in recent history.
V. The Judgment
When HP announced its write-down in November 2012, Lynch had a choice. He could remain silent, let lawyers handle negotiations, perhaps reach a settlement. Instead, he went on Channel 4’s main business program and blamed HP for running a broken company. “In a year, they destroyed that value that was created over 10 years,” he said.
That drove HP to double down even more. It made a criminal complaint in the US and filed a civil case in the UK. Against the advice of his legal team, Lynch insisted on fighting the UK civil case first. He had his team build new software to analyze the more than 11 million documents in the case. At times, he’d gather his legal team aboard the Bayesian—purchased just a year earlier—for strategy sessions.
Lynch also continued to hobnob with British politicians and founded a new venture capital company, Invoke Capital, in 2012, assembling about 60 former Autonomy employees. Most of the money in the fund came from his personal fortune from the HP sale, about $800 million. Invoke’s portfolio spun out multiple highly successful companies, with traces of Bayesian inference in each one. Darktrace became a global force in AI-powered cybersecurity, valued at nearly $5 billion in its 2024 acquisition by Thoma Bravo. Featurespace’s fraud-detection technology became standard for major banks, with a proposed £700 million acquisition by Visa. Sophia Genetics went public in 2021 at a $1.14 billion valuation.
Most white-collar defendants stay silent; Lynch insisted on taking the stand.
In this way, his wealth grew, but the legal threats hovered above him, an axe yet to drop. In 2018, Hussain, who had fought his criminal case first in the US, was convicted of conspiracy, wire fraud, and securities fraud. It was a bad omen to have a jury decide criminal liability, a much higher bar than a civil ruling.
Lynch’s civil trial ran for 93 days, and what emerged was deeply troubling. The court found that when Autonomy’s US finance chief Brent Hogenson raised alarms in 2010 about suspect sales, Lynch’s response was not to investigate but to suppress. He forwarded Hogenson’s concerns with instructions to use “the usual encryption,” warned that “emails have been known to escape,” and ultimately plotted to fire Hogenson—indicating that Lynch knew the allegations were true.
The court delivered a devastating judgment in January 2022. In a 1,700-page ruling, the judge found that Lynch had been “aware of improprieties in Autonomy’s accounting practices” and had been “dishonestly involved in manipulating the accounts.” The systematic accounting practices weren’t just aggressive. They were, the judge concluded, a deliberate scheme to mislead. American prosecutors, who had been waiting for the UK proceedings to conclude, now had the ammunition they needed. Extradition proceedings, already in motion, gained momentum.
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VI. Against All Odds
Lynch’s forced travel to the United States in May 2023 marked the beginning of an extraordinary ordeal. Federal prosecutors in San Francisco charged him in a 16-count indictment that included conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy. If convicted on all counts, the 57-year-old faced up to 25 years in prison—effectively a life sentence.
Despite US prosecutors promising the English court that Lynch wouldn’t be incarcerated pretrial, Judge Charles Breyer immediately sent him to jail upon arrival, his lead attorney Reid Weingarten recalled. “That was probably the lowest moment.” He ended up in jail for only one day, though, after posting a $100 million bond. The mathematics of his situation became Lynch’s obsession. “What are the odds?” he would constantly ask his friends and lawyers, especially Weingarten, who found it maddening. “It was the stupidest question ever,” he would later recall. “There’s just too many variables.” At the same time, he respected Lynch’s genuine curiosity—“there was nothing he didn’t know about or didn’t want to know about,” from astrophysics to politics, culture, music, even American baseball.
The trial began in March 2024, with Lynch joined by his former VP of finance Stephen Chamberlain as codefendant. From the start, it was clear that Lynch’s team had it easier. Hussain’s conviction had taught them the playbook of US prosecutors, and they’d had years to ready a new defense. Each night, Lynch and his legal team would work out who the prosecution was going to bring the next day. They also hired a “shadow jury”—a barman and a clerk paid to sit through all 11 weeks of proceedings and register independent impressions.
Most white-collar defendants stay silent; Lynch insisted on taking the stand. He presented himself as a down-to-earth British entrepreneur who had been victimized by American corporate incompetence. He walked the jury through his working-class background, his academic achievements. When prosecutors pressed him on specific transactions, he deflected skillfully—these were matters for the finance team, he was focused on technology and strategy.
One of the most effective moments came when Lynch described the experience with HP. “I watched them take this beautiful company and just wreck it,” he told the jury, emotion creeping in. “And then they had the audacity to blame me for their incompetence.”
The verdict came on June 6, 2024. As the jury foreman read “not guilty” to all remaining charges, Lynch cried. So did his wife. Chamberlain was also acquitted on all counts. Speaking to journalists later, Lynch reflected on what he’d endured: “It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life,” he said. “The question is, what do you want to do with it?”
VII. The Celebration
As part of his recovery process, Lynch planned a long summer aboard the Bayesian, full of friends and celebration. For one particular outing in August, he invited along everyone who stayed close to him during the darkest period of his life. Christopher Morvillo, the Clifford Chance partner who had helped quarterback the US legal strategy, was there with his wife, Neda. Jonathan Bloomer, the Morgan Stanley international executive who had served as a character witness, had accepted the invitation along with his wife, Judy.
The yacht itself was a 56-meter sailing vessel with a dark blue hull and a minimalist Japanese-style interior, later referred to by The Times of London as a “masterpiece of engineering and opulence.” The yacht’s original name was Salute; Lynch rechristened it the Bayesian. The vessel was magnificent but also an anomaly: It had a single, towering aluminum mast.
When that hot air collided with colder masses higher up, it produced a rotating updraft—a supercell.
The following account is drawn from official investigation reports, videos, photos, and people familiar with the accounts of the crew and survivors. The August sailing was planned as a leisurely tour of Sicily’s northern coast and Aeolian Islands. The group started in Milazzo, then spent four days exploring the volcanic archipelago. They anchored off Isola di Vulcano one day for a few hours to watch the active crater glow against the sky, visited Panarea, and enjoyed the crystal clear waters around Dattilo. It was exactly the kind of relaxed, intimate celebration Lynch had envisioned. It was also a sendoff for Hannah, an aspiring poet. The two loved to spar over meals, arguing about politics and world events, with Lynch playing the contrarian.
That weekend, Lynch received two devastating calls from Andy Kanter about Stephen Chamberlain, his Autonomy codefendant. The first call, on Saturday, Lynch answered with a happy hello—laughter and cheer audible in the background—before Kanter delivered what he called “the gravest news”: Chamberlain, a middle-aged soccer fan and avid runner, had been struck by a car while jogging and suffered a traumatic head injury. By Sunday’s call, the news was worse: The hospital was turning off life support. The group aboard the Bayesian lit a candle for Chamberlain in the church at Cefalù.
Weather forecasts for that night had mentioned possible thunderstorms, but nothing unusual for August in the Mediterranean. The five-day trip had been blessed with perfect conditions—clear skies, warm temperatures, and gentle winds. Lynch and his wife told the captain to move the Bayesian farther west to the village of Porticello to make the commute to the airport the following morning easier, in the event of rain.
The crew settled into their nightly routines. The Bayesian sat at anchor around 300 meters from shore, her distinctive silhouette dark against the night sky.
VIII. Foundering
Even as people turned in for the night, the flashes of lightning had been visible for some time—flaring from the west, far offshore where a dense cloud tower brooded—but nothing hinted it would reach the anchorage. Thunderstorm alerts were in force for Sicily’s north coast, yet forecasters expected only scattered cells. In Griffiths’ Instagram video, lightning flickers in the clouds, the flashes outlining their depths.
Meteorological analysis later showed a perfect, if unlikely, recipe for disaster: Tyrrhenian surface water near 29 degrees Celsius—2 to 3 degrees above the norm—pumped moisture aloft like fuel into a furnace. When that hot air collided with colder masses higher up, it produced a rotating updraft—a supercell.
As Griffiths ran to shut the forward hatches, the wind was already past 30 knots; 5 miles away, it was recorded at 41 knots. By 3:57 am, the Bayesian began to drift under pressure from the wind, dragging its anchor. The yacht’s chief engineer, Timothy Parker Eaton, who had sleeping quarters near the engine, felt the movement. He made sure all three generators were operating and headed to the wheelhouse—the yacht’s enclosed main control room.
The vessel was lurching, but boats, of course, are always moving. Only some passengers woke up in the dark night. Key crew members—chief officer Tijs Koopmans and chief steward Sasha Murray among them—dressed hurriedly and made their way out of the crew’s quarters. Bacares pulled on her dressing gown and went to the saloon to check what was going on. Charlotte Golunski and her husband brought their baby there, too, to avoid waking the other guests. On deck, the crew worked to secure the vessel against the building storm, closing windows and securing cabinets. Above, on the fly deck, the chief steward met a wall of rain that she’d later describe as unlike anything she’d ever seen.
Meanwhile, the chief officer climbed to the flying bridge, where Captain James Cutfield, just roused, ordered him to wake the rest of the crew. Below, a crew member passed the galley: Chef Recaldo Thomas was stowing pans. “Good morning!” he called, as if greeting just another squall.
By now the yacht was sliding south‑southeast at 1.8 knots. The yacht’s 72-meter aluminum mast—taller than a 20‑story building—caught the wind like a lever, and the boat started to heel. The chief officer confirmed with the chief engineer that engines and pumps were ready to reposition the boat.
At 4:04 am the onboard CCTV caught the flying‑bridge awning shredding in an instant, obliterated by the force of the gale. Just moments later, as Captain Cutfield grabbed the helm to swing the bow into the wind, the downburst struck. A shaft of cold air dropped from 30,000 feet and hit the sea like an invisible fist. Wind leapt from 30 knots to more than 70 knots, a hurricane-force gust that struck the Bayesian with devastating power. The weather service’s review of satellite data would later suggest bursts over 87 knots, or nearly 100 miles per hour. The yacht began to tip hard to starboard. Within 15 seconds it capsized, generators cutting out as the side hit the water. It was 4:06.
People, furniture, and glass hurled sideways as battery lights flickered on, and then off. Bacares, the Golunski family, and a steward slammed into a wall—now the floor—and were cut by shattering glass. Griffiths, thrown from the flying bridge into the sea, clawed back aboard. Records indicate that the alarm was never pulled; no one had time.
Below, guests Matthew Fletcher and Ayla Ronald escaped their forward cabin by pulling out drawers as steps. Their cabin was farthest from the stairwell—the stairwell being a pivotal location, a straight shot to the saloon, which was the best way to exit the ship. Water poured over the rails. The yacht was flooding fast.
In the saloon, a desperate human chain formed to pass people up toward the open air. The chief officer shoved Bacares up toward the central stairway, where water was now cascading down in a torrent, and another crew member pulled her up onto the side of the flybridge above. Together they handed up Charlotte Golunski and the baby, passing them person-to-person through the flooding, tilted interior. But the situation was fast evolving. Three of them were momentarily trapped in an air pocket behind the wheelhouse door—James Emslie tried to force it open from outside but couldn’t, due to the pressure of the rushing water. Eventually, one of the crew members got it open when the boat had filled with enough water for the pressure to equalize.
The chief officer, lowest in the chain, was suddenly swept back into the main saloon before he could climb after the others. The ship, at this point, was slanted on an angle and the officer was in a corner on the upper part of the slant. He surfaced in a small air bubble there: The ceiling was on his side, the wall above him. His first escape attempt failed in the black water, which was clogged with cushions and broken bits of the once-lovely interior. Finding another small air pocket, he was able on the second attempt to feel his way along the debris-filled space to the heavy glass doors at the back of the saloon, braced his feet against the tilted door frame and hauled them open wide enough to squeeze through into the open sea. He later told Italian investigators he was sure he was going to die.
The remaining passengers and crew clung desperately to whatever they could find. At this point it was clear that there would be no saving the boat, only surviving its sinking. The storm, though, was over. The wind, on the surface of the water, was quiet. Outside in the water, Captain Cutfield tried to organize the abandonment of the superyacht, telling survivors to swim clear of the mast and the boom, which could drag someone down with it. Murray counted heads and Griffiths improvised a tourniquet on Emslie’s arm. The baby balanced on a cushion, absurdly, precariously. Then the group finally caught a break: Koopmans, the chief officer, surfaced and cut one life raft free right as other crew members were trying, and failing, to get to another one. He ferried it to the bobbing group and inflated it.
From the raft, the group watched the Bayesian’s bow rise up and then plunge down. By 4:24, the boat was gone, drifting 50 meters down to the seabed. From the time the full storm struck the yacht, only 18 minutes had passed.
Ten minutes later, the chief engineer fired a red parachute flare, but higher-altitude wind carried it sideways. He fired a second, and a crew member aboard the 42‑meter steel-hulled schooner Sir Robert Baden Powell, anchored nearby, spotted it and alerted the skipper. The downburst had struck like a scalpel; the other vessel, barely 100 meters away, lost nothing more than an awning frame.
Its tender reached the raft and recovered 15 survivors. Bacares was among them, injured but alive. Her husband, daughter, and five others—Jonathan Bloomer, Judy Bloomer, Christopher Morvillo, Neda Morvillo, and Recaldo Thomas—remained inside the sunken yacht. Thomas—the chef who had called “Good morning!”—was found dead later that day.
Lynch, as a baby. He grew up in a modest household, the son of Irish parents.
COURTESY OF LYNCH FAMILY
Lynch and his daughter Hannah, who was an aspiring poet.
COURTESY OF LYNCH FAMILY
IX. The AftermathRescue boats eventually arrived, too late to do anything about those stuck inside the sunken boat. By 6 am, as the survivors reached the dock at Porticello, villagers began throwing clothing out of their windows for the barely clad group.
Andy Kanter, who was due to join Lynch with another set of lawyers on the Bayesian the following week, flew to Sicily immediately upon hearing the news. As Lynch’s close friend and business associate, he found himself coordinating with authorities and helping Bacares navigate the bureaucratic maze that follows disasters. The man who had called Lynch just hours before the tragedy to tell him about Chamberlain’s life support now faced the impossible task of managing the aftermath of both men’s deaths. In an unforgettable coincidence, Chamberlain passed the following day—meaning both men had died from freak accidents, thousands of miles apart, roughly within 24 hours of each other. This would fuel wild conspiracy theories online for months.
The scene that greeted Kanter was surreal in its intensity. The media had descended on the small Sicilian port with overwhelming force. The hotel where survivors were staying shut down reservations for five days to accommodate the press invasion, says Kanter. Reporters were climbing into ambulances, desperate for any scrap of information. Italian media speculated wildly about encrypted hard drives in the yacht’s safe, with tabloids suggesting connections to Western intelligence services. The lack of verifiable information didn’t stop the stories: One newspaper made up an interview with Charlotte Golunski, where she’d said she momentarily lost her baby for “two seconds.” In truth, she hadn’t spoken to any journalist. In one particularly bizarre moment, while survivors were ensconced at a resort hotel, a 12-foot-tall minion walked by—a jarring reminder that normal life continued even as families dealt with unimaginable loss.
What has emerged through the various investigations, and through press accounts, is a critical flaw in the Bayesian’s design.
Even before the bodies were recovered, the blame game began. The yacht’s manufacturer initially filed a €222 million claim against Lynch’s wife and crew members, though it was quietly withdrawn. Insurance companies began their own investigations, with potentially $150 million in claims at stake. Quickly, Italian prosecutors opened an inquiry, initially focusing on potential charges of negligent shipwreck and manslaughter. Captain Cutfield faced particular scrutiny—questions about the keel position, open hatches, and whether adequate warnings were given. The prosecutors moved swiftly, interviewing everybody during those first five days. Since the boat’s party were all witnesses, not subjects, they were required to sit for their interviews, even though they were literally still shaking from their trauma.
The recovery operation took days. Divers worked in dangerous conditions, navigating the yacht’s flooded interior to reach the victims. Mike Lynch, the Bloomers, and the Morvillos—Christopher and Neda—were found clustered together in one cabin on the port side, suggesting they had sought shelter together as the yacht went down. Hannah was discovered in another cabin on the same side, by herself.
The following Sunday, townspeople organized a memorial service that culminated in a candlelight vigil where people released wreaths into the water. Still, the boat sat at the bottom of the sea. In May 2025, a Dutch diver working for a company trying to recover the yacht died, adding another life to the toll. Finally, in June, the yacht and mast were recovered and brought to a terminal nearby for further investigation. By this point, the crew had dispersed across the world and have mostly stayed quiet about the event. Griffiths, for his part, still plans on working in the yachting industry.
In July, UK High Court judge Robert Hildyard ruled that Lynch’s estate and former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain owed Hewlett-Packard more than £700 million ($940 million) in damages from the Autonomy acquisition. In a postscript to his judgment, Hildyard expressed his “sorrow at this devastating turn of events, and my sympathy and deepest condolences, having come to know and admire Dr Lynch (notwithstanding my findings against him) over the course of a very long trial.” The ruling, which represented a significant reduction from HP’s original $4 billion claim, nonetheless reportedly threatened to bankrupt the estate, estimated to be worth around £500 million. Hussain, now out of prison, has started a company to help former criminals find work.
The final reports on the Bayesian sinking have yet to be released. The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch published an interim report in May 2025 that focused on design and environmental vulnerabilities—though Italian prosecutors are separately investigating the captain and two crew members for manslaughter and negligence. What has emerged through the various investigations, and through press accounts, is a critical flaw in the Bayesian’s design. The single-mast configuration that gave the yacht her elegant lines—unique among the boat designer’s sought-after series of similar vessels—also dangerously affected her center of gravity. The MAIB analysis, conducted by the Wolfson Unit at Southampton, found that with the keel raised and no sails set, the yacht became vulnerable to capsizing in winds exceeding 60 knots—a threshold crossed in seconds when the downburst struck. The other yachts in the same series as the Bayesian had two masts, not one. This problem might have been noticed earlier except for one other factor: Elite luxury yachts don’t have to comply with the same robust safety rules as commercial ones. The International Safety Management Code is voluntary for boats registered for private use.
When the downburst struck at 4:06 am, hurricane-force winds exceeding 70 knots hit the Bayesian’s towering mast like a lever, causing the yacht to heel hard to starboard. The vessel capsized within 15 seconds and sank in just 18 minutes, settling 50 meters below on the seabed off Porticello, Sicily.
Illustration: Oliver Hazelwood
The $40 million Bayesian featured a 72-meter aluminum mast—one of the world’s tallest—that gave the 56-meter vessel her elegant profile but created a critical vulnerability. With the keel raised and no sails set, the yacht became vulnerable to capsizing in winds exceeding 60 knots, a threshold crossed when the downburst struck.
Illustration: Oliver Hazelwood
What are the odds of all this happening? As I spoke to people about Lynch, I became obsessed with the probability of all these untethered events. I tried to find some way to quantify this. Consider his trajectory: Perhaps only one in 500 working-class boys win elite scholarships; one in 10 of those reach Oxbridge; one in 12 of those earn PhDs; one in 10,000 of those become centimillionaires—multiply it out and you’re already at one in 600 million. White-collar defendants are either acquitted or dismissed about 15 percent of the time, but when the CFO is already convicted? Lynch was one of the few CEOs in the past 25 years to walk free from a criminal conviction after his other subordinates had already been convicted. Then that final night: Severe downbursts strike Sicilian anchorages perhaps once every 14 years, but for one just 75 meters wide to bull’s-eye a 56-meter yacht while missing the schooner 100 meters away? Probably on the order of once in 2,300 years. And Stephen Chamberlain—a jogger’s daily risk of fatal collision is about one in 9 million; multiply by Lynch’s yacht-disaster probability and you get roughly one in 760 billion for both dying the same day.But if you look at things from a different angle, not everything seems up to chance. Lynch was an unruly thinker from his college days and a perfectionist boss who pushed everyone around him to their limits; was it inevitable that he would end up in court eventually, defending his risky decisions? In the same way, the Bayesian’s flaw is the most obvious thing about it. Standing at 72 meters, the aluminum mast was about as tall as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. The physics were baked into the design. Of all the events in Mike Lynch’s improbable life, his death turned on something that was, actually, quite knowable.
—With research from Charlie Barlow and Rania Raj
This article appears in the November/December issue. Subscribe now.
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@jon-nyc said in This is a bit weird....:
Subscribers only. :(((
Really? I read it… Didn’t know that I was a subscriber.
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As an aside, after reading the whole story, I’m starting to believe the conspiracy theories…
