The Death of 'Britain's Bill Gates' When His Superyacht Sank in a Freak Storm Keeps Getting Freakier

PERINI NAVI PRESS OFFICE. Shutterstock Images.

I think it's fair to say that most of us, seeing a headline about a business tycoon drowning when his superyacht sank off the coast of Italy just kind chalked it up to Rich People Doing Rich People Things or The Sea is a Cruel Mistress or whatever and went on with our day. 

I mean, there could be a lesson to be learned about hubris in the face of the awesome might and vast indifference of Nature. But on the other hand, it's not like he went down in a glorified propane tank pretending to be a deep-sea submarine to gawk at the watery grave of 1,500 souls that went down on the Titanic. Yachts of this size and expense are about as safe as you can expect any seagoing vessel to be. Manned by the most experience and capable crew. So it's blatantly unfair to call this anything but a random and tragic event. The sort of thing anyone risks any time you set foot on a ship and leave the safety of the dock. 

But this story has elements to it that can't be ignored. That take an otherwise understandable Act of God and bring it into the realm of the surreal. That consists of dots which, if connected in a certain way, make you have to accept some major, highly improbable coincidences:

The Guardian - Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer is among those missing after a yacht carrying UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm …  Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were also unaccounted for as of late Monday.

The update came as it was reported that Lynch’s co-defendant in a US trial related to the sale of his software company to Hewlett-Packard had died after being hit by a car in England.

The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre sailboat, was carrying 22 people and anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by a tornado in the early hours of Monday morning, the Italian coastguard said in an earlier statement. …

Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl who was saved by her mother. …

Once described as Britain’s Bill Gates, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name against allegations of fraud related to the sale of his software firm, Autonomy, to the US tech company Hewlett-Packard for $11bn.

The 59-year-old was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he had spent more than a year living in effect under house arrest. 

Hours after news of the sinking broke it emerged that his co-defendant at that trial, Stephen Chamberlain, had died after being hit by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire. 

For the record, here is Lynch:

And this was Chamberlain:

To be clear, am I saying that the death of two business partners, one while sitting at anchor off the coast of Italy and the other while jogging in the UK are somehow connected? No. Other than to point they were co-defendants in a major fraud case in US Federal Court involving multinational corporations and billions of dollars and were acquitted just two months ago. And died just days apart. Those are some pretty uncanny connections. Or wild coincidences, if you're more comfortable with that description. Carl Jung would call them Synchronicities, which he described as coincidences that seem to be too coincidental to be actual coincidences. 

Of course it takes a gigantic, Superman-over-a-tall-building-in-a-single-bound-sized leap of logic to suggest either or both of these were intentional. I've always loved the part in Godfather II where Michael is warned that Hyman Roth is too protected and whacking him is "impossible." And he replies, "If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anyone." But that movie was made 11 years after the assassination of JFK and six years after MLK and RFK. There's a hell of a long rhetorical distance between saying you can get a clear shot at someone and claiming you can make a waterspout appear in the Mediterranean and sink a luxury yacht while at the same time arranging to have a car run down a jogger a continent away. 

On the other hand, there's the matter of Lynch and Chamberlain beating the rap on that fraud case. Rarely if ever does the US federal government ever bring a case to trial and lose. According to one report I read but haven't confirmed, in 2022 they lost 0.4% of all criminal trials. If Federal Courts were basketball courts, the Feds would be the Harlem Globetrotters. The fact they lost this one in June and both defendants end up not living to see September adds a layer of intrigue to the online speculation. If not downright suspicion. 

Your results may vary. Personally, I'm going with this being one hell of a coincidence. For now. And yet I have to admit that the one thing the events of the last five years have done is to lower the bar of crazy conspiracy theories I'm willing to at least consider possible all the way to the ground. I'm not ready to go full Oliver Stone or the Pepe Silvia GIF when it comes to this stuff:

But I'm very much at Woody Harrelson levels:

So if nothing else, I think we should all be willing to at least listen to the theories that are going be put out there. Which unfortunately takes away from what should be everyone recognizing this terrible maritime accident. But there have simply been too many weird things happening to ignore the theories. Stay tuned.