The scenario is so terrible, tragic and unlikely that nobody would dare dream it up.
In the early hours of Monday, the tech tycoon Mike Lynch and guests on his yacht, the Bayesian, would have been reeling from an awful shock.
Lynch, 59, was on a lavish Mediterranean holiday with his family and defence team to celebrate his remarkable acquittal on fraud charges in the US after an over decade-long battle.
Lynch’s co-defendant in the case, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed after being hit by a car while out jogging near his home in Cambridgeshire. The mood onboard must have been sombre when a tornado over water, known as a waterspout, struck the vessel as it was moored off the coast of Sicily.
At the time of writing, 15 of the guests and crew have been rescued. But six bodies – including that of Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter – have been recovered. The dead are believed to include: chef Recaldo Thomas, Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo and Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International and Hiscox insurance, who had been a key defence witness in Lynch’s case.
According to experts, the chances of a yacht like the 184-foot Bayesian sinking while at anchor are minimal.
“I’ve been speaking to a lot [of people] in the industry today and they are as shocked as me – enough to disbelieve that this could happen,” Stewart Campbell, editor-in-chief of Boat International, told BBC’s Newsnight.
Given the improbability of these two fatal accidents happening barely two days apart, it is perhaps no surprise conspiracy theories began to swirl almost immediately afterwards.
Superyachts and billionaires are always fertile ground for speculation, even before an accident like the one that befell Lynch and his guests. The facts in this case make for a truly extraordinary set of coincidences, with added large corporate interests, a defeated US Justice Department and connections to intelligence agencies.
Fed such potent fuel, internet forums – in particular Reddit and X (formerly known as Twitter) – have exploded with conspiracy theories. Have the victims been bumped off by disgruntled US Justice officials? Shadowy corporate actors? Spooks? The Italian authorities have reportedly launched an investigation into whether portholes being left open might have contributed to the rapid sinking. As one Reddit user asserted, it’s the kind of case that “makes you question reality”.
Lynch, a British-born Irish entrepreneur with an academic background in probability theorems, was best known as a co-founder of Autonomy, a software company – Chamberlain was vice-president of finance. In 2011, the firm was sold to the American computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) for US$11 billion ($17b), netting Lynch hundreds of millions of pounds in the process. Forbes has put his personal wealth at over US$1b.
But the deal was dogged from the start by accusations of foul play – HP accused Autonomy of artificially inflating its profits ahead of the sale. A year later, the firm wrote off billions of pounds worth of value from the deal. HP brought civil charges before the US Justice Department got involved. The odds were stacked against Lynch and Chamberlain. Fewer than one in 200 of such cases end in acquittal.
Speaking just before the trip about the moment of acquittal, Morvillo, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance, said, “Our side of the courtroom erupted, it was this electric moment. I’ve never seen anything like it in a courtroom before.”
For Lynch, who had been extradited to the US for trial and faced up to 25 years in prison, the verdict was akin to a rebirth. In an interview, he told The Times, “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I’d be coming back.
“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life,” he added. “The question is, what do you want to do with it?”
Elsewhere, he criticised the US system, saying the only reason he was free was because he was able to spend more than US$30 million (fighting his case.
“The reason I’m sitting here, let’s be honest, is not only because I was innocent,” he said. “But because I had enough money not to be swept away by a process that’s set up to sweep you away.”
After the Autonomy sale, in 2013, Lynch cofounded Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm which hired former high-ranking MI5 agents for senior positions. He made Chamberlain his chief financial officer in 2016.
Given the series of unlikely events that has since befallen the pair, it is ironic that Lynch’s specialism was probability. His yacht, the Bayesian, was named after Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century mathematician and Presbyterian minister whose work revolutionised our understanding of predictions.
Bayes was famed for his mathematical formula, known as Bayes theorem, which calculates “Conditional Probability” – determining how likely something is to happen given a particular scenario. It is used in medical testing to calculate your chance of dying from cancer at a given age, and in finance to weigh the risk of lending money to potential borrowers.
Social media was awash with comments picking out the link between the principle and the seeming improbability that Lynch and his co-defendant could be struck by disaster two days and some 2900km apart.
“Stunned by likely loss of Mike Lynch – two months after acquittal after 10 years legal threat,” said one person on X. “A reference to Bayes theorem on probability [too] … how ironic [a] huge yacht sinks from tornado strike – so unlikely.”
Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge who studies conspiracy theories, says the case is a classic example of how conspiratorial thinking can arise.
“The brain’s always trying to connect the dots,” he says. “It’s hard for people to deal with random coincidences, however unlikely they are.”
Van der Linden adds that the internet and social media have led to an explosion of conspiracy theories, giving rise to legions of amateur sleuths who question the official version of events. In some cases they even start trying to investigate the case themselves.
“Social media allows for this kind of online sleuthing where people are finding their own stories and sharing with other people, which creates this vortex of unverified rumours,” he says. “That aspect is new. Ideally there should be no information void, because that’s where people start concocting their own explanations.”
In the instant-reaction online cauldron, any gap in the official version of events is likely to be seized on and subjected to wild interpretations. Missing people inspire particular speculation. When Nicola Bulley, a mother of two, went missing on a walk in Lancashire in January 2023, the online theorising became so frenzied that amateurs turned up to do their own investigations. The recent riots across the country began in part because conspiracy theorists speculated about the identity of the Southport killer. The deaths of two Boeing whistleblowers, just months apart, has also prompted wild speculation.
The Lynch case has clearly inspired similar conjecture and added to a canon of conspiracies linked to other incidents at sea, in particular. The mysterious death of the wealthy and powerful in such circumstances is a type of “information void” going back hundreds of years. Think of Robert Maxwell, the father of the disgraced Ghislaine Maxwell who fell to his death on his £15m ($31m) yacht, or Alfred Loewenstein, who vanished from his plane over the English Channel in 1928.
“Sure, you could say there’s a 0.001% chance that both of them [Lynch and Chamberlain] were assassinated by some secret organisation, but that’s not the most likely explanation,” van der Linden says. “People should be paying attention to evidence-based explanations, which take time to develop.”
Taken out of their remarkable coincidences, the facts of each accident are notably non-conspiratorial. Tornadic storms of the sort that hit the Bayesian are more common in hot or humid environments. The Mediterranean reached its highest recorded surface temperature last week, of 32C. Chamberlain was hit on Newmarket Rd in the village of Stretham. Police said the driver, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, remained at the scene and is helping with inquiries.
“People don’t like the idea that life isn’t certain, that we don’t have all the answers, that you could die at any minute, that bad accidents could happen to you,” says van der Linden. “It’s easier to believe it was all intentional and planned [rather] than somebody disappearing because a storm sank his boat.”
None of this will be much comfort to the family and friends grieving their dead, being forced to endure some of the worst days of their lives amid fevered public speculation. A fanciful theory for the internet is an all too real loss for the people involved.
Iranian missiles hit Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Ness Ziona on Sunday morning.