Mike Lynch thought a very great deal of his wife Angela. He’d fallen in love with her after she arrived late for their first business meeting, which she proceeded to dominate. Later, when his freedom and their shared fortune hung in the balance, he’d been enamoured by her fortitude and optimism.
‘Angela has an attitude that, while I am fighting a dragon, she does not want me to feel I have to look around at her,’ the British tech billionaire told me. ‘She is strong. She comes from a very poor background. I think that means you’re more resilient in having to deal with stuff so, ironically, she is probably better equipped to cope than some.’
Mike was talking back in 2021 about the prospect of being extradited to America to face criminal charges relating to a £7.5billion deal with US giant Hewlett Packard that had gone sour.
But perhaps today, exactly a year since the sinking of the superyacht that claimed not only his life but that of the couple’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, we can parse those words for some understanding of how Angela Becares Lynch is coping with her extraordinary double loss.
The pair met when Mike was a young tech entrepreneur doing the rounds of investors looking for backing.
Mike Lynch on his 300-acre Suffolk farm, which included a water mill he’d restored himself
‘What would happen is that these well-turned-out, perfect specimens of the finance world would show you into a meeting. I turned up for one with the head of a big pension fund, but my handler [the person deputised to escort him to the meeting] had not arrived, which was unheard of.
‘Suddenly this woman comes in looking like she’d got up about 15 minutes after she was supposed to have left [home]. I thought, “That’s strange”, and then I didn’t get a word in edgeways.
‘I ended up sitting there, watching her, thinking, “You are definitely different.”
‘At the end I asked for her card – she was really worried I was going to complain. I got up the courage to ask her if she wanted to go for dinner. She assumed I must be married – I wasn’t. Her secretary, a wonderful down-to-earth woman, told her, “Angela, you have to go, for the bank…”
‘She took me to the world’s cheapest restaurant so I wouldn’t get the wrong idea and learned I wasn’t married. And it went from there. We got married three weeks after 9/11.’
He was laughing as he recounted the story over a cup of tea in a barn at his farm in Suffolk. ‘The thing Angela does wonderfully,’ he told me, ‘is to keep our home life normal. I worry about the burden she carries without saying anything.’
The entrepreneur fell in love with his wife, Angela, after she arrived late for their first business meeting, which she proceeded to dominate
That has not changed. In the year since the couple’s yacht, Bayesian, sank in a freak summer storm off the coast of Sicily, Angela and her surviving daughter have cut themselves off from the world, despite being under global scrutiny and facing multiple legal challenges.
It was August 19 last year when Mike died, aged 59, along with Hannah, the yacht’s chef, and four guests who were among a party celebrating his victory in that epic US court case.
Angela survived only because she’d got out of bed a few moments earlier – after the boat had tilted sharply – and had made her way to the deck to speak to the crew.
The tragedy sent shockwaves around the world and, given that it happened so soon after Lynch had won his court case, it wasn’t long before social media was awash with conspiracy theories.
It is still a complex picture. The salvaging of the 183ft yacht, lifted from the seabed in June, has begun a reckoning in the maritime industry, with many asking whether Bayesian’s safety and stability had been trumped by fashionable design.
A British inquiry is under way, along with an Italian criminal investigation, and the families of a number of the dead are considering filing lawsuits of their own.
Meanwhile, in June, Mike Lynch’s estate – along with a business partner – were ordered to pay Hewlett Packard £700million after losing a civil case brought against them in a British court.
All of which makes it harder to remember that at the heart of this disaster was a brilliant, self-made man. So friendly and unflashy that the day I met him I actually thought I’d bumped into his gamekeeper.
I’d got lost trying to find his barn, which I think was kind of the point: This was Mike Lynch’s private world. The man flagging me down on a long, wooded track was wearing an ancient Barbour, badly scuffed shoes and crumpled trousers that hugged his ample waist. It didn’t occur
It is exactly a year since the sinking of the superyacht that claimed not only Mike Lynch’s life but also that of his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah
to me that this was Mike himself, and that he’d trudged through torrential rain and braved an unseasonably chilly wind to find me.
We were meeting to discuss his extradition battle, but inevitably we spoke about much, much more: How he’d met and wooed the ‘amazing’ Angela, how he’d learned the art of the deal serving milky tea and jam sandwiches to patients on an NHS geriatric ward, and how his childhood ambition had been to be a doctor until he realised ‘doctors don’t know the answer to problems, they are just guessing, and I didn’t like that’.
It was why he’d fallen in love with technology and its predictable, scientific outcomes.
Poignantly, he spoke about his girls, Hannah and her older sister Esme, and how he’d had to explain the criminal allegations that engulfed their happy family life.
Mike had been accused of massively inflating the value of Autonomy, his software company, which Hewlett Packard had aggressively pursued and then bought in 2011, only to declare it an over-priced dud a year later. Hannah was still too little to understand, but he’d given her sister Esme, then six, an analogy instead.
‘I sat her down, and said, “There’s this lady, and she says she’s really, really good at looking after plants and growing them. And I’ve grown this really nice plant, and she came along and she insisted on buying it. And then she didn’t water it, and it withered and died, and now she’s blaming me.”
Hannah was on board the yacht as her father held a party to celebrate his victory in an epic US court case
‘Thirty seconds later everyone is watching television again. You know what children are like. But about three weeks later, she came to me and she said, “Don’t give her her money back, will you?” So she obviously got it.’
There were many more emotional revelations – that he was scared his daughters would be bullied at school because of his predicament, and his sadness at not being able to take them on holiday – ‘not even to a beach in Norfolk’ – because he was on bail.
Mike spoke of his regret that his mother, a former nurse suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s, had ‘drifted away and died without seeing any resolution’ to his legal battles.
His beloved Cockney uncle, Bill, who’d turn up at his boyhood home in Essex to scoop him away for a day at the seaside, had also died. ‘I was there at the end, and literally his last words were, “You will be all right won’t you?”’
Mike’s voice caught as he spoke of things ‘you can’t undo or put right, it is done, it is gone’. It was the formidable Angela who kept them all going, he acknowledged.
By then I had been given a tour of his favourite bits of the 300-acre farm, including the water mill he’d restored himself. Mike had grown some wheat, winnowed it, milled it and baked bread with it. How was the loaf, I asked. ‘Very gritty,’ he said with a grin. ‘My millstone needs dressing!’
He loved Suffolk deeply. He called it a ‘rebellious’ place where ‘people have their view of you, and it goes across all social levels, so the poacher is as supportive as one of the landed [gentry]’.
He felt a deep connection with nature and animals, particularly dogs, because, unlike people, ‘they don’t care about accounting rolls, only whether you have a bit of chicken in your hand’.
The Lynch family’s yacht Bayesian, which sank in a freak summer storm off the coast of Sicily
We spoke about his early years and I asked how he’d got started. He told me it was when he fell in love with the hit 1980s TV show Fame, set in the New York City High School of Performing Arts.
One of the characters, Bruno Martelli, was an electronic keyboard wizard. As a teenager, Mike longed to emulate him, but since he couldn’t afford to buy a synthesiser – ‘not on my paper round’ – he built his own.
While he was still an undergraduate, he sold the design to a Japanese firm and watched as it was used to create music for bands from the Moody Blues to T’Pau. To build a synthesiser, you have to understand signal processing, which is the bedrock of artificial intelligence. ‘Bruno has a lot to answer for,’ he joked.
Fascinatingly, given the debate raging around AI today, Mike always saw tech as crucial to the human experience. ‘When I look at technology, the first place I look is history and people.
Tech allows something to happen that did not happen before. But what wants to happen has not changed since the time of the Ancient Greeks – people still love, fear, grieve, in exactly the same way.’
The salvaging of the 183ft yacht, lifted from the seabed in June, has begun a reckoning in the maritime industry, with many asking whether Bayesian’s safety and stability had been trumped by fashionable design
He did see that it would cause mayhem, however. ‘There’s a quote which says we have the emotions of the Palaeolithic era; the institutions of the medieval era and now the technology of the gods. So much of what is happening in the world is the fact that those three things are moving at a different speeds and rub up against each other.’
I asked him which piece of tech, of all the things he’d invented, ranging from hearing aids to the Home Office computer that revolutionised how crimes are linked and serial killers caught, was his favourite. He snorted and said that was like asking which of his daughters he preferred.
Oddly, given his life’s work, he was very fond of low-tech things, and surrounded himself with them. His Mercedes dated from the last century, and he admitted: ‘I’ve also got an old Aston Martin the same age as me – and just as unreliable.’ He played his music on a wind-up gramophone with a horn and a needle, and liked clocks that went tick-tock.
He’d learned about business in an old-fashioned way, too – wheeling a tea trolley around a hospital. ‘I worked as a cleaner and porter, and it was the best life lesson, pushing an aluminium NHS tea pot around the wards at 4pm.
‘On the geriatric ward, I was approached by an old man in his dressing gown who said he had a little plan – if I could slip him extra bread and jam, he would share it with me later.
‘I’d checked with the ward sister and he could have had as much as he wanted, but I realised it was important for me to go back and get my bit, because he thought he was beating the system.’
Mike’s father had been a fireman who told him to find a job that did not involve running into burning buildings. From that one piece of advice, he’d built an empire that would see him nicknamed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates’. But he was also a husband, a father and a farmer.
His prize-winning herd of 60 Red Poll cattle was built on a bull called Bryan and a heifer so pretty he christened her Cindy Crawford. ‘Success with at least one judge!’ he emailed me triumphantly in the middle of his extradition battle, after one of his beasts won a cattle competition. ‘As a footballer would say, Bryan done well!’
The last time I heard from him was just after he’d learned he was to be sent to America. ‘Sarah, Bit busy for next few hours!!’ he messaged, ‘but will be in touch.’
As for Angela, he reassured me: ‘She has faith in the right answer, somehow, happening, some time, eventually, which is a great thing. I do, too, but you have to make it happen yourself.’
How profoundly sad a year on from his death, and that of Hannah, those words sound now.
