The story of Mike Lynch continues to get weirder and weirder.
Timeline below...
2011: Lynch sells his company Autonomy to HP. (Autonomy had acquired Iron Mountain months prior.) The market hates the deal, the board fires HP's CEO and appoints Meg Whitman as the new CEO of HP.
2012: HP claims that Autonomy had improper accounting and $5B of the deal value is linked to "serious accounting improprieties, misrepresentation, and disclosure failures"
By the end of the year, the DOJ, SEC and the UK's Serious Fraud Office are investigating the case.
2013: Despite the ongoing investigation, Lynch founds Darktrace, a new cyber security startup.
Over time, Darktrace sells its products to various intelligence agencies.
2021: Darktrace goes public.
2023: Darktrace is also accused of accounting errors by short sellers.
Fast forward to 2024... Mike Lynch is now in the US after getting extradited from the UK.
June: Lynch and co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain are found not guilty of fraud after 12 years of criminal investigation.
A civil case in the UK for $4B still remains open.
August 17th: Chamberlain is hit by a car while jogging.
August 19th: Lynch's yacht, the Bayesian, sinks off coast of Sicily due to a "mini tornado" killing Lynch and six other passengers. A dutch boat nearby survives the storm.
Chamberlain dies in the hospital the same day.
Today: reports surface that the Bayesian may have contained "watertight safes containing two super-encrypted hard drives that hold highly classified information" tied to intelligence services.
Italian prosecutors have heightened security around the wreckage as they investigate.
By default ChatGPT is not willing to share opinions. But if you poke it the right way it will disclose its belief system (and this belief system seems to be pretty consistent across prompts)
With access to @Adobe's deep expertise and technology, we believe @Figma will be able to achieve our vision of "making design accessible to all" even faster. (2/9)
Like many of you, I grew up using @Adobe software and it was a critical part of my personal creative journey. It is an incredible opportunity and honor to help Adobe build the next generation of creative tools. And I'm really excited about what's ahead. (3/9)
We might be in the business of digital design at Figma, but we love physical objects too!
So to celebrate 10 years I'm sharing 10 physical objects that are special to me...
1. Figma's first swag! We made a rule that we wouldn't create any company swag until we shipped something, so we didn't make t-shirts until our alpha launch in 2014!
This negative space logo was designed by @bensterving, picture taken outside our first office in Palo Alto.
2. Wordmark print
@benbarry was behind Figma's first wordmark! To celebrate, our intern @skyeraydotcom made this awesome design which we all printed at a letterpress workshop.
I want to personally apologize to the @figma community for this outage. Obviously downtime like this is unacceptable and we at Figma hold ourselves to a higher standard. (1/4)
Our incredible engineering team continues to work towards bringing systems back to 100%, confirming root cause and fixing the core issue so this doesn’t happen again. (2/4)
Right now our energy is entirely focused on making @figma stable again.
We will publish a post-mortem ASAP after we’re fully back online and feel confident that we’ve accurately diagnosed root cause. (3/4)
Like @SBF_FTX said, the obvious issue with taxing "unrealized gains" is that the gains are not *realized* yet!
Biden's wealth tax would be a large scale transfer of wealth from equity holders to large banks. And a disincentive to hold a concentrated position in a company. (1/23)
Spend a brief moment thinking about how this wealth tax will affect America. The government forcing people to sell assets will obviously lead to a large scale market crash. The type of crash that could break our pension systems and bankrupt senior citizens. (2/23)
In the case of illiquid assets in private companies, by definition there are not robust markets around them, so many founders will either not be able to sell (putting themselves in massive debt to IRS) or will be forced to sell at discount. (3/23)