Beware Tech Tycoons with Piranha Tanks - with Katie Prescott
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike Lynch was often lauded as Britain's answer to Bill Gates. Born into a working-class family, Lynch's incredible intellect and passion for computers led him to become a billionaire tech entrepreneur. But behind the scenes, Lynch was a bully who couldn't bear criticism and was prone to creative accounting. When computer giant Hewlett Packard bought his company, Autonomy, it triggered one of the biggest fraud scandals in Silicon Valley history. Tim talks to Katie Prescott, Technology Business Editor at The Times and author of the book The Curious Case of Mike Lynch, about the lessons we can take from a story no one could have predicted.
For a list of sources see timharford.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.0 | The head of a Hollywood studio makes a decision that creates a catastrophe. |
| 0:08.4 | A rap producer says something that ends his friendship with Jennifer Lopez. |
| 0:12.1 | The head of the Air Force gets a call in the middle of the night telling him, |
| 0:15.2 | you guys screwed up. |
| 0:16.2 | And remember the Blackberry? |
| 0:17.4 | The guy who created the company tells the story of what went wrong. Malcolm |
| 0:21.5 | Gladwell here. Over the next few weeks on my podcast, revisionist history, we're going to tell |
| 0:25.8 | stories of mistakes. Why we make them, where they come from, how do we make sense of them |
| 0:30.4 | after they happen? Listen to revisionist history wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:41.1 | Pushkin. |
| 0:45.1 | As always, London's Heathrow Airport is heaving. |
| 0:50.3 | Security queues, shuffle forward, |
| 0:53.0 | exasperated parents trundled suitcases to the terminal with toddlers in tow. |
| 0:58.2 | Excited friends gather in bars to toast the trip they're about to take. |
| 1:03.1 | Through it all walks a heavy set, balding man in his late 50s. He's wearing a smart suit and open shirt. |
| 1:11.1 | But this man is not on a business trip. |
| 1:14.0 | The people walking politely alongside him are not colleagues, their police officers. |
| 1:20.4 | They guide him through the corridors of Britain's busiest airport and deliver him to their |
| 1:25.7 | American counterparts. |
| 1:28.8 | Here, civility ends. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pushkin Industries, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Pushkin Industries and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.