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British billionaire and tech tycoon Mike Lynch was named among the dead in the sinking of the superyacht he was vacationing near Sicily.
Lynch was among the bodies taken from the yacht, numerous news outlets reported Thursday morning.
Reuters, Sky News, the Financial Times, and the Italian press agencies ANSA and AGI were among them.
The 183-foot ship Bayesian was carrying 22 total passengers and crew, most of whom survived.
But among the missing were Lynch and his daughter, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda, and Morgan Stanley’s International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy.
Divers had pulled five bodies from the wreck as of early Thursday, the BBC reported. It said a sixth was inside the ship.
Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares.
Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, was unaccounted for, Sky News reported.
Italian authorities are investigating the exact cause of the sinking.
Lynch’s family was yet to release a public statement as of Thursday. Brent Hoberman, a British entrepreneur and friend of Lynch’s, told Sky News that his death was “unbelievably tragic.”
“We were all hoping for a miracle — we knew it was unlikely but you still hold out hope,” Hoberman said.
He called Lynch an “inspiring figure” in the tech community and should be remembered for his accomplishments.
Lynch, 59, was a former UK government advisor who founded the British software company Autonomy in 1996. By 2011, the company was so successful that Hewlett-Packard agreed to buy it for $11 billion.
But in 2012, HP alleged that $5 billion of that acquisition was due to “accounting irregularities” that caused HP to dramatically overpay.
A decadelong legal battle culminated last year when Lynch was extradited to the US on charges that he had committed fraud by falsely inflating the value of his company.
In June of this year, a San Francisco jury acquitted Lynch, who had maintained his innocence from the beginning.
“It’s just so unbelievably tragic for him to go through what he went through over the last 12 years, defending his name and not really living a full life, to now for his death to be confirmed is obviously incredibly sad,” Hoberman told Sky News.
Danny Fortson, a journalist at The Sunday Times, was the first person to interview Lynch after his acquittal for a story published in late July.
Fortson told Business Insider that Lynch was excited for a shot at a second life after spending more than a decade caught up worrying he’d go to prison.
“He struck me as somebody who was really reeling from his situation,” Fortson told BI. “I think he was a little bit still in shock, because he had been under this cloud for so long, and the consequences were so grave if he lost. I think he was really at a little bit at a loss of trying to figure out what to do with himself, how to feel, struggling with his emotions.”
“I think his first order of business was to do nothing, to try to make up for lost time,” Fortson added. “And I think that’s what this boat trip was about, very sadly.”
On Saturday — two days before the shipwreck — Lynch’s co-defendant in the US fraud cause, Stephen Chamberlain, was hit by a car while jogging and killed.
“It’s almost like a Greek tragedy, what has happened to him and Chamberlain in the past few days,” Richard Holway MBE, an IT analyst and friend of Lynch, told BI.
Holway also reflected on Lynch’s legacy as a boss and entrepreneur.
“Even though people say that perhaps he was a hard person to work for, I think people actually liked somebody who can be tough and hard and make sure that things get done. And I think he was one of those people,” Holway said, adding that Lynch liked loyalty and always repaid it.
Another friend of Lynch, Common Current CEO Warren Karlenzig who knew Lynch in the ’90s, told Business Insider that Lynch enjoyed coming over from England and hanging out at Karlenzig’s offices.
“He would like to just shoot the breeze about Bayesian logic, which Autonomy was based off of, and Thomas Bayes,” Karlenzig said, adding that Bayes, who was Lynch’s hero, also died at age 59.
“I saw the HP buyout and all the controversy with that and I was questioning, ‘Is that the same person?’ because he looked so different from the super energetic, alternative looking guy with longer hair and a goatee,” Karlenzig said of Lynch.
Karlenzig added that people in Silicon Valley “are shocked that this tragedy happened and that such wealth could not buy security.”
In the weeks following his acquittal, Lynch told Fortson that he had grown more spiritual and was considering what he called “Saint Peter questions” about Heaven and Hell, and what it all means.
“I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back,” Lynch told Fortson for The Sunday Times. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.”
