Mike Lynch was the UK’s answer to the truculent titans of California’s Silicon Valley: an authentic tech genius turned billionaire with some rebarbative character traits to match. Autonomy, the software business Lynch founded in Cambridge in 1996, rocketed into the top bracket of UK companies and was bought in 2011 by the US computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) for $11 billion. But HP regretted the deal before the ink was dry and swiftly wrote off most of Autonomy’s value, accusing Lynch and his team of fraudulently inflating its revenues to boost the sale price. 

Civil proceedings followed in London and, after a controversial extradition, a criminal trial in San Francisco. Given the rarity of acquittals in US fraud trials and the weight of evidence already heard in London, the 58-year-old Lynch was widely expected to spend most of the rest of his life in an American prison. But remarkably he walked out of court a free man in June 2024. And then he died, just ten weeks later, in the freak sinking off Sicily of his superyacht Bayesian, which also took the lives of his daughter Hannah and five others.

That, in a nutshell, is ‘the curious case of Mike Lynch’, which Katie Prescott, the technology business editor of The Times, elucidates with exemplary fairness and clarity. In essence, she reduces the case to three key questions. First, was Autonomy an honest business as well as an undoubted pioneer of