Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Rise and Fall of a Tech Titan - Katie Prescott

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Mike Lynch was a working-class kid from East London who built one of Britain's greatest tech companies, and then watched it all collapse in a fraud scandal that stretched across two continents, two courtrooms, and ultimately, cost him his life. Katie Prescott joins me on Open Book to tell the story of a man who was flawed, brilliant, damaged, and damaging — and what his rise and fall says about the way we worship billionaires and the culture we've built around them. Katie Prescott is the technology business editor at The Times and a weekly columnist for the newspaper’s award-winning business section. A regular on Times Radio and The Times’ daily podcast The Story, she is a familiar voice to millions of listeners after a decade reporting for the BBC and presenting the business news on Radio 4’s Today. She is the current host of The Times Tech Podcast, and was the winner of ‘Tech Commentator of the Year’ at the UK Tech Awards. Get a copy of her wonderful new book The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: The Improbable Life & Death of a Tech Billionaire Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://www.scaramucci.net/allthewrongmoves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Lots of people who start businesses and get them to a certain stage and they get bought by US companies. And Mike Lynch was really unusual to build this company and take it to the heights that he did. And I think I hadn't quite realised being perhaps a generation behind him just how disliked he was in that process. But, you know, I was astonished to speak to grown men and were talking about their trauma of working with him. And they would cry. And these are sort of senior figures he would not expect to still be feeling upset about their experience.

so many decades on. There's this very, very complex story around the saga of autonomy, his business being bought by Hewlett-Packard, and the huge falling out from that. And so many people got caught up in the pain of that transaction, either because they were interrogated by the FBI, pressure was put on them from both sides to say certain things or behave in a certain way. And it's astonishing to me decades on how it's affected people. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Katie Prescott. She's the technology and business editor at the Times. And Katie, wow. I mean, what a book. Okay, the curious case of Mike Lynch, the improbable life and death of a tech billionaire. I got to take a breath a few

times during this read. It's, I mean, this is not a normal guy, obviously. Then this is not a normal situation and it says so much about where we are in our society right now. But before we get there, tell us a little bit about Katie Prescott and welcome to the show. Oh, hi. Well, thanks so much for having me and thanks so much for your interest in the book. I think wow is right. That's how I felt when I was reading it. So I'm a journalist at the Times of London covering tech and I started my beat there just before ChatGPT launched. So you can imagine the last few years have been pretty intense. And before that, I spent 10 years at the BBC as a business correspondent.

So, yeah, and I got interested in the story of Mike Lynch because I was covering his criminal trial out in California for the Times. And I was looking around for a book or a sort of comprehensive documentary about his life. And over here in Britain, he's a really big, big tech figure. and I couldn't find anything. And so I became really intrigued by this story. And that was the genesis of the book. I don't want to sound like sour.

I'm not a billion. I guess I am a billionaire if I'm in Zimbabwe, Katie. But perhaps all of us are billionaires, right? Because it takes $10 billion across town with a cab. But I feel like there's something longgoing in the culture. I feel like there's almost sociopathic behavior that gets rewarded through dollars and cents and then a result of which your bank account is you get you you you sometimes get exalted uh tell us let's start with mike lynch tell us a little bit about mike lynch

mike lynch came from a not very wealthy family at all in um the east of london born to irish immigrant parents and one of the most astonishing things about his story is actually in britain we still have a very divided class society, as you know, and he did not come from the establishment at all. He was extremely bright, and that was spotted very early on, and he went to a private school on a scholarship. So he would have been there surrounded by middle class kids whose parents could afford to pay for them to go to private school. He really excelled there. He went through Cambridge, where he studied science and the dawn of the computing era, and rode that experience. exciting period of computing back in the days where you could sort of take tech apart and put

it together again and really mess around with computers, perhaps a little bit like people are doing with AI today. And at a time when I think a lot of people were going into the city of London, it was the big boom that had happened in the late 80s, he decided to stay in Cambridge and started a company called autonomy, which was... a search business at a time when, you know, digital information was booming and people were trying to work out how to sift through all of that information. And he, I said he rode the wave of the computing era. He rode the wave of the dot-com boom.

He floated the company three times in Europe out on the NASDAQ and then in London. And because it was that time, even though it wasn't making huge amounts of revenue at the time, about 44 million pounds a year, it was valued at four billion pounds, another parallel perhaps with the AI era today, and jumped straight into the FITZE 100, so the top stocks listed here in London. So, you know, he had this kind of astonishing rise, and at the age of 30, he was running a Futsi 100 company, of an incredibly bright guy, as I said, but also a really cruel man. And that was one of the things that came through in my research quite early on that really surprised me was how ruthless he was and how difficult to deal with and how he just burnt through relationships. Was he detached, was he perhaps so smart or wired in a way where he was detached from human emotion and his EQ didn't necessarily connect with his IQ?

How about saying it that way? I think that, yeah, that's very astute. but he could also tune in to his EQ when he wanted to because he could be really manipulative as well. So he wasn't on the spectrum, as you might say, that he was unable to build relationships with people quite the opposite. You know, he wasn't a typical tech geek. He had a couple of bands while he was at school and at university. He had lots of girlfriends, which people at Cambridge said to me, you know, it was not quite not a sort of stereotypical Cambridge science geek. So I think he had EQ when he needed it, but he had an ability to be extremely cruel.

And I think he thought that that sort of fear in business and within his teams got results. And I think it did actually for him, but it certainly didn't. It made him a lot of enemies along the way. I'm going to ask it differently. Okay, ready? Yeah. And we're going to put some sociological. frame on it. You're coming from no money. You're in a very class structured society. You're in

with a lot of rich entitled people, but you've got no money, but you're probably as smart, if not smarter than them. Do you think he harbored resentment from that? And again, I'm asking you to reach a little, but you know a lot about the guy. Yeah, I don't think he harbored resentment, but I think he realized that the world was not automatically going to work for him in the way that it did for others. You know, coming up through the British private school system, going through Cambridge, he would have been surrounded by a lot of people who perhaps were quite entitled and saw that they had a certain path in life. And I don't think he took anything for granted.

And he thought he had to fight for everything. And so I suspect that contributed a lot to his behavior towards other people. You know, it was a kind of dog eat dog world, every man for himself. Yeah, I mean, you got that feeling. You know, another thing you said about your research process and I'm quoting you now, you said that it was Lansing Puss-filled boils. I remember saying that? Yeah, I do, yeah.

And one of your sources, you're going to be lifting up rocks and finding all sorts of nasty things underneath the rock. So what was one of the single most shocking things that you found in the research for this book? Some of it I can't say, I'm afraid. But I think one of the most... Give me a juicy one that you can say, Katie. I'll tell you all fair. I think it was his treatment of people.

So in Britain, as you know, we do not have many massive tech. CEOs. We've got lots of people who start businesses and get into a certain stage and they get bought by US companies like think about Demis de Sabbis, the boss of Google D-Mind. And Mike Lynch was really unusual to build this company and take it to the heights that he did. And I think I hadn't quite realised being perhaps a generation behind him just how disliked he was in that process. And so this isn't in the book, but I was astonished to speak to grown men in the aftermath of this book being published who reached out to me and were talking about their trauma of working with him and they would cry and these are senior figures he would not expect to still be feeling upset

about their experience so many decades on and I hope people will read the book and sort of try and understand the story a bit more but there's this very very complex story around the saga of autonomy, his business being bought by Hewlett-Packard and the huge falling out from that. And so many people got caught up in the pain of that transaction, either because they were, you know, interrogated by the FBI. The pressure was put on them from both sides to say certain things or behave in a certain way. And it's astonishing to me, you know, decades on how it's affected people. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week.

We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. You know, it's a weird case, though, right? So he's accused of fraud effectively. He gets acquitted in the United States, but he, the court finds, you know, after his death, of course, that the estate owes over 700 million pounds, at least a civil court in the UK. So how do we reconcile those two verdicts? Everything about this story is totally improbable. So as you say, the judge in the UK civil case in the High Court here in London found for Hewlett-Packard and said there was absolutely fraud at autonomy that Mike Lynch had led it, along with his chief financial officer, Sushaband-Husayn. The other thing you didn't mention was Sushaband-Husayn was sent to prison in America for fraud after a criminal case. And so the presumption was that the criminal case in California, where Mike Lynch was tried in 2024, would result in a guilty verdict.

Now, I think this book has taught me a lot about the justice system and how it works. And it's something that Mike Lynch spoke about as well. But I've understood it like this. Look, in the high court, the judge really, really understood accounting and took two years to come up with this verdict. And software accounting is notoriously difficult. Quite boring. It was a bit of a struggle to try and bring it to life for the book, actually. But he went through this with a fine-tooth comb.

You're talking about a very different sort of trial when it comes to a jury trial, right? So these are not people who are trained accountants. You're also talking about a different balance of probability. And so much of this book is about odds and probability, which is the last. that Mike Lynch saw the world through. So, you know, they were looking to see whether it was sort of beyond all doubt that he could be guilty in the criminal case. And by that point, his lawyers had listened to the evidence from all of the people

testifying twice before. So they had a very good sense of what they were going to say. They really, really prepared for that. And the other thing they did, which was seen as a stroke. of genius in the legal community and there's actually won awards for the legal teams involved is they put Mike Lynch on the stand to speak to the jury and he told the story of his life. He told this rags to Rich's tale and I think particularly in California and San Francisco where you guys have this sort of understanding of, you know, an entrepreneurial journey and mindset

that played really, really well. And then the other difficulty was there was someone else on trial with him who we haven't mentioned, who was his vice president of finance in Cambridge at autonomy. And so really, the Department of Justice was also fighting two cases at the same time. So I think that's how, you know, as you see in the book, I don't think there's any doubt there was fraud at autonomy. No one's really, he always denied it, but, but I don't think that there's any doubt of that. I think we, we're not even debating whether or not there's fraud, right? It's just the threshold of evidence. Yes.

tips in the UK, but it doesn't tip in the United States. And the difference between criminal and civil cases. Exactly. And so, so about Med Whitman for a second. You know, I know Meg, I bet, I actually fully disclosed. I'm a donor. I was a donor of Meg's gubernatorial race. I know Meg a long time.

She's a good friend of Mitt Romney. I'm very close personal friends with. She had great success at eBay. She's running Yulah Packard. And you write about her. So tell us a little bit about her. So tell us a little about her and your impressions of her and her reaction. By the way, I should also point out she grew up out here on Long Island with me.

And so there's a culture on Long Island. When you're uncovering people like Mike Lynch, you can get a little emotional about it. Okay, so talk a little about it. Oh, I want to know what your view is then. Do you remember this happening? I have you share my view. I have you share my view. I would have punched this guy in the face, probably.

Okay. But, I mean, do you remember this happening to me? Again, I'm going to talk to you very honestly. one of the things about me, if you worked at Skybridge and you mistreated people, you probably would get punched in the face by me. And the worst thing you could do to somebody like me, I have a 70-plus year old receptionist. She's been with me since I started the firm 21 years ago. If you want to demean her, okay, you have to remember something about me. My grandmother was a mate. Okay, so we don't demean anybody. Everybody's treated equally and everybody's treated fairly and with dignity and kindness.

So Mike Lynch, as a kid from Long Island, the way he was acting, he would have gotten punched in the face. I'm just being very open with you, Katie. Okay. That's it. I mean, you can't treat people like that. Okay, it's a problem I have with a lot of these billionaires. They think that they're better than other people.

Okay. What Mike Lynch's point, though, which I think is one that I see is I have friends of mine that are installing sheet rock out here on Long Island that are smarter than some of the Wall Street lawyers that I know. It's just that their fathers were installing sheetrock Katie. So they didn't get the chance to go to the fancy pants schools, okay, that these other kids did. And so there's a little bit of sympathy there for this poor kid with this super high IQ gets thrown into an environment that he doesn't adapt well in that environment. You know, there's an expression in Italian that I'll translate for you in English. You have to know, certainly you have to remember

where you came from, Katie, but you have to know where you've gotten to in life. And there's a Savoy Affair that's required when you're a leader that this man had none of. That's just my honest opinion. So, I mean, by the way, the book is awesome. And so I'm very excited to have read it and have you on the show. That's my opinion, Katie. How's that? I think, yeah, so Meg Whitman joined us story when you said she was the boss of eBay.

And then she was on the board, if you look, Packard. Yeah. Hewlett Packard's former boss, a guy called Leo Apotheca, a German guy, bought autonomy and then was basically instantly fired, right, before the deal could go through. So Meg Whitman was left with this, arguably, arguably. Yeah, but she had been on the board when it went through. But yes, that and you could say a poison chalice as well. And she liked things done by the book, as I understand. I'm interested to hear your views on that.

She was running an enormous business, 300,000 people. It was described as a bit like the Civil Service, a very old school bastion of Silicon Valley. And she suddenly gets this young, slightly scrappy, British company, which has grown by acquisition essentially. So it's a bit of a hodgepodge of different businesses run by this guy who's never had a boss before. And suddenly she's his boss.

And I'd also be interested in your views on this. I think there's a bit of a US-U-K culture clash going on. Certainly a startup, more established culture clash too. And Meg and Mike hated each other. And she really didn't take kindly to his slightly scrappy, rude attitude. I don't think she liked some of the things that they discovered when they bought autonomy. And in return, Mike Lynch found H.P. really difficult to deal with.

He always prided himself on the fact that autonomy was run like a startup, that he was an independent sort of guy and that they could move very quickly. And suddenly he's in this enormous giant company where, well, he said afterwards, it was like working for HP was like being waterboarded. Well, listen, you know, I like her. She's got a complex story in her own right. But what a, I mean, what an entanglement those two together. My God.

I mean, you know, you're, you are very British, by the way. I just have to just point this out to you because you're very diplomatic. Okay. You're not, you know, I mean, you know, very. I mean, you're so delicate. I think that's probably a bit BBC, is it? Yeah, yeah, the Caddy K. BBC etiquette etiquette, where, you know, you're not saying what I'm thinking. So I have to say what I'm thinking.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. But you're thinking what I'm thinking. Don't, I don't think I don't know that, Katie. Okay. I don't think that's a very good trait. No. I like it, though. I like it.

I was trying to be balanced. I think a lot of the problem of this book is it caused so much pain. And it's so controversial. And both sides are so passionate that they were right. I was really trying to tread a quite a difficult line throughout and show both sides of it. Let me ask you this question. This is a very broad question. And this is you've interviewed everybody, you know, Altman, all these guys.

All these guys. Right. I sat here the whole thing. Let me go back. Broad question. elites can fail? Yes or no. Can elites make really bad decisions based on your life experience at observing them?

Yes. Can they fail? Yes. And yet when they fail, how do they fail differently than regular people? They have bigger bank accounts and they're cool. I mean, I'm just thinking of one guy at the moment who, you know, it's quite a common path here, just moved to Dubai. they don't have the same, you know. They fail into a safety net, don't they?

They fail into a safety net, into a wealthy bank account. I don't know. Is there some unfairness of that too, maybe? What do you think when it comes to this book? Well, no, I think, well, he got away with it, right? I mean, he dies unceremoniously and tragically. I mean, you don't think that that was a murder or anything like that. It doesn't read like that in the book, right?

So he died. Yeah, I didn't think it was a murder. No. No, right? It dies from this accidental, horrific situation at sea, right? But other than that, he got away, Scott Free, more or less, right? Well, he didn't. He didn't, actually, because he's left his family with a really difficult predicament. So the civil trial, as you say, that he lost in the UK, his family are now facing paying that money, which is 700 million pounds, his estate. is worth about 500 million pounds.

So it looks like that will bankrupt to the estate. Now, will that bankrupt the family? As we know, you know, what the estate is worth and what they're worth are two different things. Probably not, actually, unless Hewlett-Packard really, really decide to go totally nuclear after his widow and some of her assets. Let me re-referre it. Let's say he had lived.

Yeah. How do you think this would have gone? I think his reputation would still be really trashed. think that his reputation was as important to him as his bank balance. So I think you're right in terms that yes, elites fail into a safety net. And so was he ever going to be destitute in the way that would happen to some people? No. But would all of the doors that he used to love being open for him in the government. Here, you know, he was on the board of the BBC. He had all these prestigious jobs. Would those shut? Yes. And had already started to do that before he went

out to the States for his criminal trial. So there's a cautionary tale here, right? Some of your reviewers have said, what a cautionary tale. What lesson from Mike Lynch's story should every person in a position of power tattoo on their arm? Hubris. I mean, it's an ancient one, but it feels like that just threads through the story. It's terrible to say the fact that his boat had one of the tallest masts in the world was something he was very proud of.

And that was, in the end, why it capsized so quickly. from the desire to make his revenue figures look better than they were, even when the company was making sales, right? This wasn't a business that was failing. It was a good company. This is like the kid Sam Bankman-Fried. He would have been worth $5 billion as opposed to trying to be worth $100 billion, which was fictitious and unreachable, at least at that moment in his life,

maybe 30 years later he could have done it, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I think there's another one which is, to your point, point about kindness and about being nice to people on the way up because you never know when you might need them on the way down. I mean, to me, there's no costs of being nice and it's a separating factor and it leads to happiness. You think he was a happy guy, Katie?

No, I don't. I think he was angry a lot of the time, actually. And then I think the last 10 years of his life, my God, fighting those legal battles in the way that he did. and the energy and mental toll, not to mention the financial toll, that that took, I think was horrendous. Actually, it's kind of astonishing that he managed to found so many companies during that time. That was a testament to the force of his personality. He's a very talented guy.

There's no question about that. Also, it's a cautionary tale about the way we celebrate billionaires and the way we celebrate tech leaders. I think we have to keep our eyes a little bit more open about that. You know. Yeah. All right. So we're down to the five words. You've ever listened to this podcast. We come up with five words from your book. And now we want one or two sentences from you as the author. Okay. You ready? Go on. Okay. So I say the word technology. You say what? Exciting. Well, you don't want me to say a sentence. No, no, that's good. You can say a sentence if you want to. Changing the world. You're in the rhythm. What about Sillian Valley? Sest pit. Or we would say Sess Poole. Right. You say Sess Poole. Right. You say Sess Poole. You say Sess Poole. You say Sess. spit, we say cesspool. I say tomato, you say tomorrow, right? All right, yeah. I mean, that feels unfair. I like Silicon Valley. I'm fascinated by it. But, you know, it's tough out there, though, right? It's really tough out there, right? Yeah. One-sided, I think,

also shapes it. You know what they say about Washington, you know, it's, it's Hollywood for ugly people, right? Silicon Valley is Hollywood for smart people, you know. If it were, people on the spectrum, maybe. Autonomy. I mean the company. I say the word autonomy, but I mean the company. I want to quote the judge here who said, I mean, I'm paraphrasing something along the lines of, it's a tragedy that this amazing tech company will always be known for fraud. Yeah. And it had so many good things going on and he was on top of the AI space before the AI space became hot, you know.

Right. This is a figure and I'm going to need a little bit more than a sentence because I'm introducing him late in this podcast. Stephen Chamberlain. Who was Stephen Chamberlain? And what are your thoughts there? Stephen Chamberlain was Mike Lynch's VP of finance. So he was the deputy to the CFO, who's the guy I said got sent to prison. And based in Cambridge, it was astonishing interviewing people around Stephen because it was rather the opposite of the people I interviewed about Mike. Everybody loved him. He was really popular, warm, family man who was a great mentor to a lot of people in. Autonomies Finance Department. And he got inevitably caught up in all of this after the fraud allegations were made by Hewlett-Packard. And he ended up going out with Mike to San Francisco to face trial in that same court that eventually found them both not guilty. I think one of the things that I found really difficult about Stephen is everybody around him said,

like this guy would never, never do something wrong. But it's very hard to understand how you could be that senior within the finance department and not have spotted problems. Yeah. But he always said he wasn't guilty. And he left these astonishing diaries that he started writing when he was out in the States, living away from his family who was still based here in the UK. And, yeah, just kept sort of asserting his innocence through it, through it all.

I mean, he's a fascinating character. You know, the book is outstanding. All right, these are the last two words, and then I'm going to give you the last word. Okay, my last two words are Mike Lynch. Flaude, brilliant, damaged and damaging. Okay, well, the title of the book is the curious case of Mike Lynch, the improbable life and death of a tech billionaire. It's written by Katie Prescott.

And listen, this book is awesome. You know, I got to tell you, I really enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to meet you at the Sky News event. And thank you for joining us today in OpenBull. Thank you so much.