The Weekly Spill (In Shorts)
Welcome to The Weekly Spill—Silicon Bay Partners’ regularly scheduled download of thoughts, takes, and the occasional side-eye at the world as it actually is (not just as it’s pitched in a deck). Each week, we sift through the noise across current events, politics, startups, and financial markets to bring you what matters—and what’s just pretending to.
We aim to keep things light, even when the topics aren’t. That means a bit of satire where it’s earned, a bit of skepticism where it’s called for, and a commitment to staying grounded in facts even when opinions sneak in through the side door. We won’t always be non-judgmental—but we will always try to be clear-eyed.
Think of this as your informed, occasionally irreverent briefing for the week ahead. Read it for insight, stay for perspective, and feel free to disagree—that’s o.k. too. Fair warning: Sometimes we spill more than once a week!
Are Too Few Murders Really A Bad Thing?
Iceland is, by many measures, the safest country in the world, averaging around four murders annually for a population of just under 400k. Its residents must turn to fiction to spook themselves: crime is Iceland’s most popular literary genre. That kept Dr. Petur Gudmann Gudmannsson, the country’s only full-time forensic pathologist, busy answering questions from the country’s writers. He even taught a continuing ed course for crime novelists but had to quit — it was too gory.
Big Sneakers To Fill?
Monday was Tim Cook’s last day as CEO of Apple, and John Ternus is now at the helm. If you think starting your new job was intimidating: one Bank of America analyst estimates that Apple’s market cap grew ~$32m per hour, every hour, for the 15 years Cook was CEO.
The Business of Being Lonely
A fledgling “loneliness economy” is booming, according to Vox’s author Allie Volpe. This boom has been fueled by warnings about just how bad loneliness can be for us—“comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” as one often-cited comparison puts it. But can loneliness really be cured with a credit card? Forget timeshare scams. Selling companionship by the hour could be the next great American business model.
The Man Who Gave Us Trump
A just released book written by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark sheds fresh light on ruthless Roy Cohn, the President’s mentor and fixer. American Scoundrel is a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn, the New York mob lawyer whose extraordinary life charted, as the book’s subtitle has it, a “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”. Will the president be thumbing its pages?