Inside the life of brilliant and eccentric Mike Lynch - The James Bond obsessive who became Britain's Bill Gates and took on the US legal system By Tom Leonard Published: 23:18, 19 August 2024 | Updated: 23:26, 19 August 2024 e-mail View comments As a mathematician whose particular expertise was probability, Mike Lynch prided himself on defying the odds. The nerdy multi-millionaire entrepreneur – dubbed 'Britain's Bill Gates ' – even named his superyacht after the 'Bayesian' statistical theory on which he built his software fame and fortune. He boasted that he created a software empire by ignoring conventional business wisdom – and in June he defied conventional legal wisdom that says you can't beat US federal prosecutors when he was acquitted on all counts in one of Silicon Valley's biggest-ever fraud trials.
Yet surely even Lynch might have discounted the odds, just two months after being spared spending the rest of his life in a US prison, of dying when a freak Mediterranean 'tornado' sank his yacht. The 184ft Bayesian, named after the 18th century English clergyman and statistician Thomas Bayes, sank off the Sicily coast. Tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch with his renovated mill, at his Suffolk farm in 2021 Mike Lynch when he was managing director of the Autonomy corporation which developed software for the web His luxury yacht, the Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily just before 5am on Monday His wife Angela (pictured together), the yacht's registered owner, was amon.