THE IMPROBABLE

Tech billionaire Mike Lynch made probability his life's work, until his wildly unlikely death at sea. Now, many of his friends and associates-and survivors of the disaster-are speaking about what happened for the first time.

- by BRADLEY HOPE

IN THE PREDAWN hours of August 19, 2024, bolts of lightning began to fork through the purple-black clouds above the Mediterranean.

From the rail of a 184-foot vessel, a 22-year-old named Matthew Griffiths took out his phone to record a video. The British deckhand was just a week and a half into his first official yacht job, and he wasn't on just any boat. The yacht, the $40 million Bayesian, was a star of the superyacht world, considered to be a feat of minimal design and precision engineering. As thunder rolled toward the anchored vessel, Griffiths set the video to AC/DC's “Thunderstruck” and posted it to Instagram. It was 3:55 am.

In the video, the Bayesian’s aluminum mast, one of the tallest in the world, is briefly visible against the roiling sky.

Below deck, the yacht’s owner, Michael Lynch, had every reason to be sleeping soundly. The boat trip had been organized as a celebration. Months earlier, Lynch had walked out of a San Francisco federal courthouse a free man, acquitted of all charges in one of the largest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history.

Lynch had built his fortune on understanding probability, on turning the unlikely into the possible. He had named his yacht Bayesian in honor of the statistical theorem that made him a billionaire, after the sale, in 2011, of his company Autonomy. The British tech giant sold software that could find meaningful signals amid the flood of unstructured data in emails, videos, and phone calls, but it would be better known as the company that allegedly defrauded, and nearly destroyed, Hewlett-Packard.

The cabins aboard the