The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: The Improbable Life & Death of a Tech Billionaire

Read by the author, Katie Prescott.

A maverick outsider. An improbable life. An even more improbable death. Discover the real story of Mike Lynch, Britain’s enigmatic billionaire.

From humble beginnings, Lynch rose to become one of the UK’s richest men, driving the development of his business Autonomy before selling it to Hewlett-Packard for more than £11bn in 2011. Famously abrasive and hard to read, he soon found himself embroiled in one of the biggest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history, his reputation in tatters.

After a vicious legal battle lasting more than a decade, a British judge found that Lynch had fiddled the accounts. A mere two years later, he was exonerated by a US jury, swerving jail for the rest of his days. Just as he was celebrating his freedom, this second chance at life was snatched away. Almost thirteen years to the day that the Autonomy­–HP deal was signed, Lynch’s yacht, Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily, taking the lives of Lynch, his daughter and five others. Hours earlier, his co-defendant, Autonomy accountant Stephen Chamberlain, had been hit by a car in Cambridge and killed. The odds of the two deaths occurring together were estimated at four in one billion.

Drawing on extensive research and exclusive access to key sources, award-winning Times journalist Katie Prescott forensically explores the life and death of this elusive maverick. Prescott takes us into a high-stakes world of corporate subterfuge and rivalries, zigzagging through the hallowed halls of Cambridge, across the frenzied streets of the City of London, and straight to the heart of Silicon Valley. A brilliant feat of investigative reporting, this is a tale where nothing is quite as it appears.

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© 2025 Macmillan Business (Audiobook): 9781035074273

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Audiobook: 13 November 2025