The Peak Weekend Reader

Good morning. Today’s story is a profile on tech-investor-wunderkind and billionaire-manqué Andrew Wilkinson. He’s the co-founder of Tiny, a Victoria, B.C.-based holding company that owns a 60% stake in Letterboxd. Wilkinson stands to make a hefty sum should the rumoured acquisition of Letterboxd by Netflix, A24 or other reported bidders go through — the film-review platform is valued at US$300 million. Writer Stephen Smysnuik spoke to Wilkinson and insiders in his orbit, pored over earnings statements, and scanned almost every tweet Wilkinson ever posted — no small feat.

The story took 40 hours and a round-trip ferry to Victoria, B.C., to write. Over the course of editing, we exchanged 261 text messages and several phone calls. All that time and effort costs money — thousands of dollars, in fact. But the result is one of the best things we’ve ever published, so we’re making today’s entire edition free for all readers to showcase what we can do with the support of premium subscriptions. We have big goals to grow this readership, which will allow us to publish more original features, continue to pay writers fairly, and cover more topics that matter.

If you believe in that mission of ambitious, independent Canadian journalism, please seriously consider signing up for Peak Premium to keep this work going.

Happy reading,
Liz

📺 We’re getting a Sam Bankman-Fried TV show. Cast your mind back to the start of the decade — barely anyone was talking about AI; the world was instead vibrating with excitement over all things crypto (NFTs, anyone?). Then FTX came along and put a damper on all that, a saga that Netflix will try to capture in “The Altruists,” a new limited-edition series premiering in November. The trailer feels a bit on the nose, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

🕊️ Navi Pillay was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. South African-born Pillay is a judge on the International Court of Justice and is currently working on a case in which Myanmar has been accused of genocide. Previously, she was the UN high commissioner for human rights, the first non-white woman to serve on South Africa's High Court, and she participated in the legal defence of Nelson Mandela. 

🍷 Thieves stole €5 million worth of fine wine from a prestigious Italian winery. A gang of masked men broke into Tuscany’s famed Marchesi Antinori winery, pilfering 30,000 bottles of wine, each ranging in price from €120 to €400. The winery’s CEO called the heist unprecedented in Italy’s history, though several other smaller-scale thefts have occurred at other Italian wineries in recent months.

🖼️ Gen Z are spending more on fine art than any other generation. The average art collector aged 20 to 29 spent $347,000 on art last year, the highest of any generation (baby boomer collectors, the second biggest art buyers, spent $165,000). Of course, those surveyed were not your typical casual art buyers — responses were only solicited from people with a net worth of at least US$1 million, excluding real estate and private business assets.

Being forced to use clunky, poorly designed software and navigating complicated, pointless bureaucracy are two of modernity’s most widely loathed experiences. Perhaps, then, it was only a matter of time before they inspired violent street protests in France. 

Parcoursup, a newish university application portal, is not the only reason hundreds of thousands of French students have taken to the streets, but it’s a prominent item in a longer list of complaints about the state of French schools. Glance at photos of the crowds, and you’re likely to see it referenced on placards. Its abolition is one of the protestors’ main demands. So why has a software tool serving a seemingly mundane purpose — facilitating applications to university programs — become such a flashpoint?

The difficulties with Parcoursup began soon after its introduction in 2018, when it was touted as a way to make university applications fairer and more transparent than the previous Admission Post-Bac (APB) system. APB was designed to make admissions more efficient — rather than applying separately to each program, students would all apply through a single portal. However, it was soon beset with problems, stemming from the fact that French university degrees are legally open to anyone who has completed the baccalauréat, a national exam taken at the end of high school that was created by Napoleon in the 19th century. In practice, the vast majority of students now pass the baccalauréat, meaning that there are often more applicants than there are places in popular programs. In those cases, APB resorted to a random lottery, which people did not like, and led to cases where students who didn’t select backup programs wound up without a university spot.

Parcoursup was supposed to fix these problems, but appears to have mainly made them worse. Students are no longer allowed to record a preference for certain programs, and universities now review each application. The universities’ selection process is opaque, and each program has its own rules. Protesters have also complained that many high schools don’t adequately prepare students for exams, diminishing their odds of acceptance into competitive programs (hard to argue with, given that France’s Ministry of Education reports that almost 10% of teaching hours in public high schools aren’t taught at all, largely due to absent teachers). In a recent survey, 77% of parents said Parcoursup caused them anxiety, and only 5% agreed it was fair. 

The system has also created problems for universities, which are now inundated with applications (every applicant picks up to 10 programs) that they are expected to review. In practice, it appears that careful human review of every application is not happening, and the task is being left to algorithms. Last year, one applicant made the news by successfully applying to a university with a brownie recipe as her cover letter.

In short, France scrapped a university application system because it was viewed as opaque and unfair and replaced it with a new system that many think is… also opaque and unfair. Of course, anger over Parcoursup is just a part of broader discontent over the dysfunctional state of France’s public education system, which suffers from the already-noted high levels of teacher absenteeism, unusually long school days, overcrowded classrooms, and decrepit facilities with no air conditioning. Reasonable concerns, no doubt — though likely not ones that would inspire high school students to face down riot police and expose themselves to tear gas in many other parts of the world.

📡 What else is on our radar:

By Stephen Smysnuik

Andrew Wilkinson is leaning over a hearty chicken salad, telling me all about his ADHD medication. It has been, in a way, his salvation.  

Wilkinson was diagnosed with ADHD in 2025 and suddenly everything made sense. His life up until that point had been marked by a relentless anxiety that felt like a high-octane fire in the skull. He tried to outrun it by chasing more: more wealth, more businesses, more connections. It was never enough. 

“There was a lot of anxiety there around money and wanting to make a lot of it so I could make my family happy and make the anxiety in my head go away. I went crazy and did [all] this to the nth degree, and I was still miserable,” he says. 

Forget happiness. Money, it turns out, can’t even buy level-headedness. But suddenly, there were the meds.

“When I medicated, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I don't feel that itch anymore,’” he says. “I don't feel that anxiety.”

We’re sitting at Caffe Fantastico in Victoria’s Quadra Village on a gorgeous August afternoon. It’s been a month since news broke that Tiny, Wilkinson’s holding company, is planning to sell Letterboxd, the popular film-tracking social media site, of which Tiny owns 60%. The platform is valued at US$300 million and could earn Tiny — and Wilkinson — a “hefty sum.”

The sun is gleaming off whatever product he’s applied to his hair to hold his coif in place, and his personal items are assembled in a pile next to his elbow: iPhone, Apple Watch (he’s also sporting a Steve McQueen Rolex Explorer on his wrist), keycard, and a half-empty packet of XyliMelts, the small, adhesive mints that dissolve slowly over time, which he uses to combat dry mouth from his medication.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of Wilkinson leading into this interview. He inhabits a peculiar space in online notoriety: you’ve either never heard of him, you confuse him for the former leader of the B.C. Liberal Party with the same name, or you follow most, if not all, of his prolific missives on whatever online realm he inhabits these days.

Or maybe you’ve worked for him, as I did for a time, at Overstory Media Group, Wilkinson’s troubled news startup. I never interacted with Wilkinson, who was more like a mythic being we heard from now and then via cryptic tweets that could have been about our company if we squinted.

I met him only once, briefly, in the green room of Vancouver’s Vogue Theatre as he was about to go on stage to speak in front of 1,200 people. I didn’t think he’d remember me, and he confirms as much.

It's tempting to form an opinion based on those things alone, along with the fact that he fervently promotes himself online as an unabashed Rich Guy at a time of growing wealth disparity.

But Wilkinson is easy to talk to. He’s charming in a way that could be dialled up for the benefit of the person writing a 2,000-word profile on him, but could also be the secret to his success. He might be a person with 1,000 times my net worth, but, like me, he's a divorced dad with two kids who loves film and pickleball — though he built a court on his property. 

He's both down to earth and out of touch in a way that the super wealthy tend to be. 

I ask him what he makes of the notion that people have never heard of him. Does he have trouble breaking through to the general public, or is it simply the nature of online bubbles?

“It must be a bubble thing,” he says. “People have recognized me on the streets of L.A.”

Wilkinson was raised in Shaughnessy, the “poor kid” in Vancouver’s wealthiest neighbourhood, which he describes as a “weird mind fuck.” His father owned an architecture firm, which, given the volatility of that industry, was in perpetual financial distress. The Wilkinson household was rife with money stress as a result, and Wilkinson soaked all that tension up. 

“I would go to my friends' houses, and I'd see their dads seemingly relaxed, living in big houses and driving nice cars. I was going like, ‘What's going on here?’ My dad's working so hard and he's so stressed out. There's something not fair about this,” he says.

“There's this great Francis Ford Coppola line: ‘The story of the father is embedded in the son.’ So I was like, OK, I'm going to be successful in business. I want to be a rich dad.”

By 2020, Wilkinson had developed a reputation as a kind of tech-investor wunderkind, initially by starting the boutique design agency Metalab, which he launched in 2004, and then with Tiny, a holding company that he and co-founder Chris Sparling modelled to be Berkshire Hathaway 2.0. 

He’d also become known, whether it was true or not, as a billionaire — a title he wrestled with, but ultimately embraced, publishing a memoir in 2024 called Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire. 

“There were times where I'm like, ‘Fuck yeah, I was objectively a billionaire.’ Then there were other times where I was like, ‘Yeah, you people are fudging it,’” he says.

By 2024, Wilkinson’s carefully curated image was decimated in a trifecta of humiliating blunders. First, there was Overstory, which was positioned as a solution to preserve local journalism, but ended in mass layoffs and intense public criticism instead.

Then, Tiny went public — a disaster that wiped out roughly 90% of the company's value in the following two years, and resulted in Wilkinson and Sparling stepping down as co-CEOs in June 2024. The fallout also erased a considerable amount of Wilkinson’s net worth just as his book was being launched, which opened him up to further criticism.

“I've been utterly humbled in that regard,” he says.

➡️ Click here to keep reading

In A Few of Our Favourite Things, Peak staffers and guest contributors share one thing they’re loving right now. This week’s theme: we asked travel journalists to share their favourite destinations.

My pick is Abruzzo, Italy. I just got back from a few days in Caramanico Terme, a tiny, charming mountain town surrounded by Majella National Park, where one of my friends from university recently relocated. I loved how quickly you can go from hiking the Valle dell'Orfento and e-biking across sweeping mountain views to luxuriously long lunches, local wine, and ridiculously good food — like arrosticini (sheep skewers grilled over charcoal) and handmade pasta with wild boar and local game. Abruzzo has all the dolce vita magic you're looking for, while still feeling blissfully under the radar. — Katie Bridges, editor, Twenty Two Media Group

Everyone says the Galápagos is on their bucket list — but I was skeptical. I decided to see for myself in December on a small-boat expedition, and I must confess that I couldn't have been more wrong. Swimming with penguins, sea turtles, and sharks ruined snorkelling for me as nowhere else compares, and my concerns about overtourism were quelled when I saw how tough the islands' environmental protection rules are. — Joel Balsam, travel writer 

Galicia in Spain’s northwestern region, along the coast. It’s incredible for fresh seafood and Galician beef, delicious, crisp white wines from the Rías Baixas region, and lots of charming coastal towns and history, connected to the Camino de Santiago. — Gizelle Lau, travel writer 

I recently stayed on Nukubati Island in Fiji, which is now one of my top three destinations for diving. The family-run eco-resort is right beside the Great Sea Reef, the world’s third-largest barrier reef, where you can see healthy coral, multiple shark species, and different geology. It’s a new favourite destination for its small-island atmosphere and the immediate feeling of being welcomed into a family. — Madigan Jane Cotterill, digital and travel editor, Canadian Geographic

Tokyo and Seoul. I love the chaotic charm of a big city, where boredom is impossible. Japan has been trending among travellers for a while, and hallyu (the K-wave) has brought South Korean pop culture to the world. If you can’t decide between these two vastly different, fascinating capitals, see both on the same trip, as I did recently. A flight between the two cities is only about 2.5 hours (a blink of an eye compared to the long-haul from North America). And I’d happily visit them again for the food scenes alone. — Wing Sze Tang, travel writer

Grimsey Island, Iceland. Iceland's lesser-known, but very lively, "second city" is Akureyri on the north coast. Worth visiting in itself, Akureyri is also the jumping-off point for Iceland's northernmost island, Grimsey, and the only part of Iceland that actually crosses the Arctic Circle. A haven for puffins, Grimsey has a working harbour with a small airport, a shop, epic views, and guesthouses where you can — quite literally — walk to the Arctic Circle and be back in time for tea. — Will Ferguson, award-winning novelist and travel writer

The long weekend: a perfect time for a few puzzles. Here is The Peak’s Saturday Crossword, the sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who!

 Then, put your media literacy to the test and uncover the fake news headline.

Keep scrolling for the answer.

Headline #2 is a lie … for now.