How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, by Theo Baker; Penguin Press, 336 pp., $32
The campus is a classic contested site: a place that makes people safe for ideas, an incubator of unlabeled eggs, a bright island in darkness. In 2022, 17-year-old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford craving greatness, proud to believe in tech-driven change. “I still am, I guess,” he tells us, “but my relationship to this world has grown … complicated.”
Very. Silicon Valley talent groomers targeted Baker in his first weeks at Leland Stanford Junior University (est. 1885, current endowment $40.8 billion), and the black comedy of his involuntary upgrade from idealistic coder to global commodity reveals how the school’s science-bound are “cosseted and buttered up, exploited, manipulated, funded, bribed, and cultivated” by adults desperate for fresh frontal lobes to power the next trillion-dollar offering. Venture capital firms circle, offering yacht parties and slush funds to students who cannot yet vote, drink, or rent a car.
“Investors buy into hype cycles,” Baker writes, “knowing that the next Google will set them up for life. There seems to be more money now than ever, and more of it focused on a mythologized view of a young founder.” The canonical story is that of Facebook, which was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. Mark Zuckerberg fell out with Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, the classmate who had originally funded the venture with a check for $15,000. “Nowadays,” Baker notes, “Stanford clubs will spend twice that on a party.”
How to Rule the World recounts Baker’s freshman year, during which he lived one scandal and then covered another as a student journalist. “I found myself torn,” he explains, “between two worlds—that of a programmer glimpsing jaw-dropping wealth and that of a fledgling reporter revealing unsavory stories despite steep resistance.”
The Ivy League still trades in old-school power, but much of Silicon Valley was built on Stanford land by Stanford talent, and that symbiosis (and profit sharing) produced Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Theranos, Tesla, Google, and Lyft. Stanford alumni and faculty founded Netflix and LinkedIn, Open AI and Zillow, Victoria’s Secret and Trader Joe’s. The university “even operates its own VC fund to seed students, bragging that companies it has incubated are ‘3X more likely to reach $100 million in valuation.’ ”
No one expected a crossed wire like Baker. He joined the Stanford Daily’s investigative team, reporting first on the university’s infamous War on Fun, then testing the deeper waters of academic misconduct. Baker’s labors soon linked neuroscientist and biotech executive Marc Tessier-Lavigne to decades of questionable studies containing falsified research data and image manipulation; some papers he supervised dealt with treatments for Alzheimer’s. Tessier-Lavigne was a multimillionaire, a rumored Nobel Prize contender.
He was also the president of Stanford.
Strange doings in the Palo Alto C-suite keep cropping up. Secret deferred compensation packages have funneled millions to former presidents and deans, and in 2019, the Varsity Blues admissions bribery scheme made world headlines. An irate administration sent top law and public relations firms after Baker and the Daily, then embraced the modified limited hangout tactic—concede a little, stonewall the rest—invented for Richard Nixon by Stanford alumnus John Ehrlichman. It didn’t work for Watergate, nor did it deter Baker. The secrecy reflex of the rich and powerful is the engine of How to Rule the World, and its demolition is the reason Baker became the youngest-ever recipient of a George Polk Foundation special award for “a reporter who exhibits steadfastness and bravery and whose work does not fall into a typical category.” (Past Polk winners include Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.)
Tessier-Lavigne resigned. Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Baker’s story. The Stanford Daily continues its First Amendment battles, suing the Trump administration in 2025 for threatening noncitizen student journalists with surveillance, detention, and deportation. More comparatives would have been welcome in Baker’s tale: Do other prime STEM schools like MIT, the University of Chicago, and Caltech handle bold reportage with better grace?
And in this galacta-bucks universe of tech oligarchs, where are the women? Mostly shut out, Baker writes. “There are a hundred and fifty people—and they’re all men—who run the world,” the billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya once told a Stanford audience. The students listened, enraptured; after all, the lecture was titled “View from the Top.” “Anyone who wants to go into politics? They’re all puppets,” Palihapitiya continued. Instead, to succeed is “to aggregate enough of the capital of the world to then reallocate it against your worldview. And that’s why so many people are desperate to go here.”
Cleanly written, admirably sourced, Baker’s postpandemic tell-all is modeled on One L, Scott Turow’s classic of elite induction at Harvard Law, and shares a Y chromosome with other identity quests in hostile terrain, from Wall Street (Liar’s Poker) to backcountry Alaska (Into the Wild ). Early on, the author overplays the naïf—false modesty in an Andover product whose parents are supernovae of journalism. His father, Peter Baker, is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Susan Glasser, his mother, once editor of Foreign Policy and Politico, now covers D.C. for The New Yorker.
Except for wrenching war memoirs like Samuel Hynes’s Flights of Passage or Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle, few teenage lives warrant a book-length retelling. But How to Rule the World, set amid luxury and evil, is combat testimony, too, whether read as an audit of rot, a dark-academe survival tale, an obituary for the campus honor code, or a horror story rich in helpful tips: how to vibe-code fabulous tools, how to afflict the comfortable where it hurts, how to preserve a soul.
The Stanford development office is unlikely to hand out free copies, but this is an invaluable map, drawn by a participant-observer, for an amoral world where poets need not apply. This June, Theo Baker, once sworn to computer science, receives his Stanford B.A. One of his two majors is history.
