British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and five others are missing after their luxury yacht capsized in a heavy storm off Sicily early Monday, Italian authorities and civil defense said. Lynch’s wife and 14 others survived.
Lynch was one of six people still missing after their charter yacht sank off Porticello, near Palermo, sometime after 4am. Salvo Cocina of the Civil Protection Agency of Sicily said that an overwater cyclone known as a hydroponic hit the area overnight.
Rescue authorities said one body had been recovered, and police divers spent the day trying to reach the ship’s hull, which was anchored 50 meters off Porticello. They returned to the site after 10pm.
Fire and Rescue Service spokesman Luca Cari said: “The team checked the site to see if it was possible to carry out searches overnight, when the weather is expected to get worse. “
Who is Mike Lynch?
The British newspaper The Guardian said that Mike Lynch, a software millionaire, is one of the few examples of a British businessman who created a global technology company.
This fact has led him to be known as “Bill Gates of Britain”, but in fact his story is very different from the story of the founder of Microsoft.
Less than three months ago, the 59-year-old was acquitted of 15 fraud charges against him in the US over the $11.1 billion purchase of the Silicon Valley giant in 2011, a case he feared would it would end when he died in prison because of her case.
“I have a number of medical problems which would have made it very difficult to live,” Lynch told The Sunday Times last month, “If things had gone wrong, it would have been the end of life as that I know.”
Lynch was born in Ireland and grew up near Chelmsford in Essex, where his mother was a nurse and his father was a firefighter.
He studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at Cambridge University, eventually specializing in adaptive pattern recognition. His doctoral dissertation is said to be one of the most widely read papers in the university library.
After launching a few early technology startups—including a company specializing in automated license plate, fingerprint and facial recognition software for police—he founded Autonomy in 1996.
Its software has been used by companies to analyze large amounts of data.
The luxury yacht that sank off Sicily during a violent storm in the early hours of Monday has been named Bayesian.
Autonomy was an almost immediate commercial success. The company went public in Brussels in 1998, and rapid growth with the rise of the Internet led to a move to the London Stock Exchange, where it entered the FTSE 100 index of the best listed companies. in the United Kingdom.
Lynch’s influence led him to become a scientific adviser to David Cameron when he was Prime Minister and a non-executive director of the BBC, as well as receiving an OBE in 2006 for services to corporations.
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2024-08-20 07:46:00
