“Hollywood loves to see a British villain getting their comeuppance,” says Andrew Orlowski in The Telegraph. So when Mike Lynch, 59, the British tech entrepreneur who was extradited to the US 13 years ago to face fraud charges, stood before a jury last week in San Francisco, “he had every reason to fear the worst”. Fewer than 0.5% of US fraud prosecutions result in an acquittal. Yet Lynch (pictured) was found not guilty and was able at last to walk free.
The Essex-born entrepreneur was once hailed as a great British success story. His PhD was on neural networks, the foundation of today’s generative artificial intelligence, and he launched several companies before he was 30. He co-founded Autonomy in 1996, and its IDOL software boasted a “miraculous ability to find what was relevant in unstructured data”.
His downfall began in 2011 when HP, a desperate computer maker trying to reinvent itself, bought Autonomy at a 68% premium in a deal worth $11bn. It was carried out in such a rush that HP’s chief financial officer later admitted she hadn’t even read a due diligence report on the acquisition. Within a year, HP had disposed of its CEO, torn up its strategy for renewal, wrote down the value of the investment by almost $9bn, and charged Lynch with fraudulently inflating the value of the company it had bought.
The verdict is vindicat
