Tech tycoon Mike Lynch, Who died After his yacht sank off Sicily, he had tried to put the Silicon Valley debacle that had tarnished his reputation as an icon of British ingenuity behind him.

Lynch, 59, hit the jackpot when he sold the software maker Autonomy, which he founded in 1996, to Hewlett-Packard. for 11 billion dollars in 2011But the deal quickly developed into a Albatross for him after he was accused by HP’s then-CEO Meg Whitman of falsifying the books to facilitate the sale and was fired.

His death was confirmed on Thursday by Italian authorities after they found his body and five others from the sea, was a dramatic turn of events that, after his acquitted of criminal charges in the US in June.

Before joining HP, Lynch was widely hailed as a visionary who inspired descriptions that portrayed him as a British version of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Lynch has served as science and technology adviser to two British prime ministers. He also founded Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm that was a founding investor in British cybersecurity company Darktrace, and Luminance, an artificial intelligence platform for the legal industry.

Lynch was “a major figurehead of the technology scene in Cambridge (England),” said his friend Brent Hoberman, former CEO of travel website lastminute.com. Hoberman told the BBC that Lynch was “a trailblazer for British entrepreneurs to commercialise their inventions on a global scale”.

A ten-year legal battle ended with Lynch’s extradition from the UK to face charges that he had planned a massive fraud against HP. HP was a company that had helped shape the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley since it was founded in 1939 in a garage in Palo Alto, California.

Lynch has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and claimed he was being made a scapegoat for HP’s own bungling – a position he maintained when testifying before a jury during a two-and-a-half-month trial in San Francisco earlier this year. U.S. Justice Department prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses to prove allegations that Lynch was guilty of accounting duplication and defrauded HP of billions of dollars.

The trial ended with Lynch being acquitted and he promised to return to the United Kingdom and seek new ways of innovation.

Although he avoided potential prison time, Lynch still faced a civil trial in London, which HP largely won in 2022. Damages in that case have not yet been determined, but HP is seeking $4 billion. Lynch earned more than $800 million from the sale of Autonomy.

Forbes estimated his wealth at $1 billion in 2015, the only year he was on the magazine’s richest men list. Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper this year estimated that Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares were worth £500 million ($655 million).

Lynch, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, made his name running Autonomy, which developed a search engine that could sift through emails and other internal business documents to help companies find important information faster. Autonomy’s steady growth over its first decade earned Lynch one of Britain’s highest honors, the Office of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, in 2006.

John Browne, chairman of the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research institute and former boss of energy giant BP, said Lynch’s “ideas and personal vision were an important contribution to science and technology both in the UK and worldwide.”

The Royal Academy of Engineering, of which Lynch was a fellow, expressed its “deep sadness” at his death and said he had played an “active role” as a mentor and donor.

In the months before the collapsed deal, HP valued Autonomy at $46 billion, according to evidence presented in the trial against Lynch.

The process presented contrasting portraits von Lynch. Prosecutors portrayed him as an iron-fisted boss obsessed with hitting sales targets, even if it meant resorting to duplicity. His lawyers, on the other hand, portrayed him as an entrepreneur with integrity and a prototypical techie who enjoyed eating cold pizza late at night while thinking of new ways to innovate.