Tech Billionaire Goes Missing After Superyacht Sinks

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Fatal Premonition

A British tech tycoon and his 18-year-old daughter have gone missing after the superyacht they were vacationing upon sank off the coast of Sicily.

As the BBC reports, Autonomy and Invoke Capital founder Mike Lynch and his daughter are two of the six people missing after the Bayesian, the 183-foot-long luxury yacht on which they were sailing, sunk early in the morning on Monday after being struck by a tornado east of the port town of Palermo.

Considered "Britain's Bill Gates," the 59-year-old tech tycoon became a billionaire after selling his enterprise software firm Autonomy to Hewlett Packard in 2011. As The Guardian notes, Lynch was under federal fraud investigation in the United States for that sale until June of this year, when he was acquitted on all counts.

Prior to his disappearance, Lynch said that he believed that if he went to prison over the fraud charges, he would likely have died there due to a lung condition he suffers from.

"I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive," he told the Guardian last month. "If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense."

Death Spout

Witnesses to the tragedy told the Italian news agency Ansa, per the BBC, that the force of the waterspout — a tornado that occurs over water, basically — caused the ship's aluminum mast to snap in half, causing the craft to become unstable and eventually sink.

Of the 22 people on board the Bayesian, 15 people — including an infant girl and Lynch's wife Angela Bacares — have been rescued. One person, whose identity has not been revealed, has been found dead, and three other people whose names have not been revealed are also missing.

As CNN notes in its reporting on the luxury vacation gone horribly wrong, Bacares, the one-year-old girl, and six other people were hospitalized. The person who died was apparently found on the ship's hull, per an Italian Coast Guard statement provided to CNN.

Salvo Cocina, who leads Italy's civil protection agency, noted in a media conference quoted by ABC that another superyacht in the vicinity suffered far less damage than the Bayesian.

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Cocina said.

He also noted, per ABC, that the other nearby yacht, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, helped rescue Lynch's wife and the 14 others who were saved from the disaster.

More on maritime terror: Man Rowing Across Ocean Suddenly Realizes He's Surrounded by Over 1,000 Whales