Who is Mike Lynch, the tech entrepreneur among the missing after a superyacht sank?

Mike Lynch, the 59-year-old British tech investor, is among those missing after a luxury yacht he was on was hit by a tornado and sank off the coast of Sicily, Italy early Monday.

Mike Lynch, the 59-year-old British tech investor, is among those missing after a tornado hit a luxury yacht he was on, sinking it off the coast of Sicily, Italy, early Monday, a source told CNN. Lynch garnered much of his wealth from cofounding Autonomy, a tech company purchased by Hewlett-Packard, or HP, for $11 billion in 2011. An attorney for Lynch recently revealed that the entrepreneur’s total worth is around $450 million. The Autonomy sale was one of the biggest British tech deals at the time but quickly went sour, with HP writing down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion within a year. The Autonomy acquisition was meant to fuel HP’s software business. Instead, the blockbuster sale has been bogged down by legal problems that recently culminated with a fraud trial. Prosecutors accused Lynch and former Autonomy finance executive Stephen Chamberlain of scheming to inflate Autonomy’s revenue before selling to HP. In June, Lynch was acquitted on 15 charges — one count of conspiracy and 14 counts of wire fraud — in a San Francisco court. The verdict came as a surprise to Lynch. “When you hear that answer, you jump universes. If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense,” he told the Times, a UK newspaper. Autonomy, founded in 1996, became Britain’s biggest software company and a member of the blue-chip FTSE 100 index. Lynch was lauded at the time by academics and scientists and was asked to advise the British government on technology and innovation.