Mike Lynch rose from hospital janitor to billionaire by founding Autonomy, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. HP later wrote off $8.5 billion and sued him for fraud. After winning acquittal, Lynch died in a yacht incident; his co-founder was killed in a hit-and-run.
The British Bill Gates. So he grew up super poor, but he's a hard worker. He's smart, and he ends up getting a scholarship to go to school. At 16, he becomes a janitor at a hospital. He goes into Cambridge and he gets a PhD. He starts this company called Autonomy. Machine learning, big data. He ends up selling it to HP for $11 billion. Couple years later, HP ends up writing off $8.5 billion of that acquisition, and they say, you guys cooked the books. You inflated your revenues, your profits, your balance sheet. So they sue him, and in the suit, Mike Lynch owed $4 billion in damages that are still pending. The end of the story is he's acquitted on all charges. He's a free man. To celebrate, him, his family, his lawyers, they all get on a yacht and they start sailing. And mysteriously, freak yacht accident, and he dies. At the same time, 48 hours later, his co-founder, who was also acquitted on the same day of all the charges, is going for a run and gets hit by a car. And so it's kind of strange that this guy who was in this multi-billion dollar fraud suit, just a couple months after being acquitted, him and the co-founder both killed in freak accidents. Yeah.
