How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University

by Theo Baker

"A rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that ‘sets the agenda for the planet’ . . . in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle Liar’s Poker.” —The New York Times

"If Baker’s portrait of Stanford could be its own movie (The Internship crossed with The Skulls), his gripping account of how a tip turned into a history-making investigation has the makings of All the President’s Men." —The San Francisco Chronicle

“Poignant, maddening, and genuinely hilarious, How to Rule the World is to be devoured—and fast, before Stanford buys up and sets fire to every copy. (Talk about a burn book!)” —Mark Leibovich

Winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford’s president, Theo Baker offers a revelatory and gripping account of Silicon Valley hubris

Slush funds. Shell companies. Yacht parties. This is life for Silicon Valley’s favored teenagers.

Seventeen-year-old Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior.

Stanford, he realized, was less a school than a business. Its annual budget was nearly twice that of Harvard or Yale and higher than those of 116 countries. The product? Students. Especially those special few identified as the next trillion-dollar startup founders. For them, there were secret societies, “pre-idea” funding offers, and social calls from billionaires, all with the expectation that these geniuses would soon join the ruling elite.

At the helm of this business was Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a superstar neuroscientist and wealthy biotech executive. But when Baker joined the student newspaper and started poking around the Stanford president’s record, he discovered never-reported allegations of research misconduct in studies published across two decades bearing Tessier-Lavigne's name.

Only one month into college and thousands of miles from home, Baker began receiving anonymous letters, going on stakeouts, and tracking down confidential sources. High-powered lawyers and public relations teams were hired to attack his reporting. Stanford opened an investigation into its own leader. And by the end of the year, Tessier-Lavigne was out as president.

This is the incredible journey of a reluctant teenage reporter who uncovered a story that shook the scientific world and became front-page news across the country. It is also an unprecedented inside view of the students learning to rule the world—and what they’re learning from those who already do.

How to Rule the World is a shocking, hilarious, and moving debut, showcasing Silicon Valley’s training ground as never before.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Education, Business, Technology, Biography

336 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2026

Reviews

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

When reading a non fiction book, there are three things I look for: a subject that I know little or nothing about, a narrative structure that keeps me immersed in a new world, and excellent writing that includes an erudite vocabulary. How to Rule the World hits the trifecta.

This book covers many topics from the absurdity of a university policing evey aspect of its students behavior to the teen suicide epidemic. It's the books primary focus on modern journalism and the rot and debauchery that exists in the tech community both in and around Stanford however, that had me reading cover to cover with just a five hour break for sleep.

While I'm sure much will be made of the bacchanal of the tech field which is very frightening for those of us that are concerned about the lack of safeguards in that industry, I found the story of Baker's turn to investigative journalism to be more compelling.

Theo Baker was 17 years old when he began the research for his Polk Award winning work at The Stanford Daily. Quick to point out that so many Stanford students are true geniuses, he writes of the brilliance of those around him while it is obvious he is every bit as intelligent. This book was published this week as Baker simultaneously turns 20 and graduates from Stanford.

Again and again, I was struck by the high standards of journalism when done right. As is true for all reputable news organizations, lawyers and editors reviewed every word of Baker's articles multilple times with rewriting required to meet the exacting standards of factual reporting. There is no "fake news" here. A solid case is made for subscribing to and thus investing in our national newspapers.

If I sound like I'm gushing, I am. Baker's parents gave him a T-shirt with a quote from one of their journalist friends (responding to his work in The Daily) that said , "Theo Baker is a fucking menance." He is, and we are the better for it. 

Read this book. I'll be reading everything he writes from here on out.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Seductions of Being Recognized Too Soon
Theo Baker’s “How to Rule the World” is a funny, uneasy, and revealing portrait of Stanford’s training in access before accountability
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos. April 28th, 2026

“How to Rule the World” is most alarming in its quietest register, when it stops looking like an exposé and starts looking like a course catalog no registrar would admit to printing.

At Stanford, in Theo Baker’s telling, money, reputation, and students still learning the campus map keep saving seats for one another. Influence does not knock; it saves you a seat. The instruction is social before it is official: selective rooms, curated silences, consecrating emails, venture-capital introductions, dinner invitations, student clubs, private seminars, and public-relations choreography. The campus weather has a lesson plan of its own. Being chosen can begin to feel like being right. The classroom is not always labeled. Sometimes it has a wine list.

The plot has the neatness of campus legend, which is to say it sounds exaggerated until the paperwork arrives. A seventeen-year-old freshman comes to Stanford as a tech-obsessed coder, joins the student newspaper, and soon finds himself investigating Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the university’s president, a decorated neuroscientist and biotech executive. The reporting into research misconduct allegations attached to studies bearing Tessier-Lavigne’s name escalates through anonymous letters, confidential sources, institutional pressure, legal machinery, public-relations counterpressure, and Stanford’s own inquiry. By the end of Baker’s freshman year, Tessier-Lavigne is no longer president. That alone would be enough for a tense campus investigation with unusually expensive carpeting.

“How to Rule the World,” though, is sharper than its easiest headline. Its stranger education concerns Stanford as a finishing school for premature power, a place where certain students are identified early as founders-in-waiting, prospective billionaires, builders of whatever tomorrow will later insist was inevitable. Baker is most exact when he notices the ethical distortion in this machinery. The students he observes are not only studying, coding, falling into friendship, or learning the freshman-sized humiliations of ordinary life. Some are being courted by capital before they have fully formed companies, adult selves, or much practice answering for anything.

The book’s most chilling word is not corruption. It is potential.

That distinction matters because Baker is susceptible to the spell he is diagnosing. He comes to Stanford with some version of the brochure-lit enchantment: laboratories, sculpture gardens, radiant résumés, proximity to genius, the intoxicating promise that the future is built by young people who forget to sleep and eventually become case studies. His disillusionment has force because the aura works on him first. He understands the voltage: why a teenager might mistake investor attention for evidence of destiny, why a private dinner might feel like initiation, why a place lacquered with money and expectation might scramble the usual order – prove, then be praised. At Stanford, in Baker’s portrait, the sequence often seems reversed. First you are praised, then funded, then mythologized; judgment can be penciled in after the term sheet.

Baker shows that education can happen through seating charts, funding whispers, and small coronations. He is very good at noticing how status recruits before it commands. Here, access becomes a hidden curriculum: who is brought into the room, who is told they are special, who receives money before proof, who learns that secrecy is not merely concealment but status. The title, with its comic-villain shine, initially sounds like an insult aimed at an overconfident campus. Then the book reveals how literal that insult can become. One of Baker’s best moves is to let absurdity ripen until it stops being a joke and starts being evidence.

His prose has the quickness of someone who understands that comic timing and ethical timing are not opposites. Baker’s preferred unit is escalation. A beer-soaked freshman anecdote turns into a founder parable. A campus café becomes a talent market. A student gathering becomes a sorting mechanism. A private seminar becomes a miniature empire rehearsing its table manners. His sentences tend to move quickly, in a reportorial rhythm that keeps scene, quote, implication, and punch line close together.

The diction is alive to the overlap between startup language and reputational laundering: builders, founders, funding, valuation, access, truth, shame, integrity. The Stanford-adjacent founder world prefers words that make ambition sound clean, frictionless, and already vindicated by scale. Baker puts grit back into the sentence.

That pace is a gift until it starts becoming the culture’s unpaid marketing department. “How to Rule the World” is propulsive, often very funny, and at its best lets farce indict itself without the author thumping the lectern. The scenes of Silicon Valley courtship have a bright little poison: teenagers treated as prototypes of prospective rule; investors sniffing out youth like truffle pigs in quarter-zips; brilliance and branding passing each other name tags at the same party. The wit is not ornamental. It exposes the world’s self-seriousness by refusing to be solemnly impressed.

Speed, though, sometimes becomes its own traffic. Baker has almost too much good material: scandal, science, student journalism, founder myth, institutional defense, wealthy teenagers, invite-only rooms, academic polish, reputational fog. The account sometimes stacks too many indictments in one display case. Stanford is asked to be university, corporation, incubator, reputation machine, ruling-class nursery, and Silicon Valley shrine. Much of this is persuasive. Not all of it can bear equal weight. The book is strongest when it stays close to rooms, documents, emails, conversations, incentives, and rituals. It is less convincing when Stanford begins to carry the moral burden of an entire civilization with a meal plan.

Formally, the book is crowded in a productive way: memoir, investigation, and cultural critique sharing one dorm room and occasionally borrowing each other’s chargers. Memoir gives it immediacy; investigation gives it consequence; cultural critique gives it range. When the braid tightens, the effect is electric. Baker’s freshman year becomes a counter-education. While some of his peers are learning how to be desired by capital, he is learning what status does when challenged: how it phrases denial, hires expertise, absorbs and delays doubt, distinguishes technical exoneration from accountability, and makes correction feel like an attack on the brand. The movement from campus comedy to institutional exposure is one of the book’s most effective designs. What first looks like atmosphere gradually reveals itself as training.

The strands do not always carry equal weight. The Tessier-Lavigne investigation has natural suspense: tip, source, pressure, inquiry, fallout. The Stanford-startup material has social comedy and diagnostic bite. Baker’s personal coming-of-age story has charm, speed, and the vulnerability of proximity. The strongest version of this design makes the parts implicate one another rather than queue politely at the microphone. More often than not, they do. Still, there are moments when one can hear the memoir, investigation, and campus satire honking at the same intersection. The result is rarely dull. If anything, the book’s problem is abundance: more evidence than patience, more astonishment than silence. For a debut built around a year this strange, that may be less a defect than a plausible medical condition.

The comparison that kept returning to me was a paired one. “Uncanny Valley” by Anna Wiener captured the inward weather of tech disillusionment; “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou showed how Silicon Valley charisma can bully scrutiny into submission. “How to Rule the World” by Theo Baker moves the question earlier, to the campus rooms where young people learn which kinds of charisma will be rewarded before the adult world has to pretend to be surprised. Baker’s subject is not simply that Silicon Valley corrupts, or that elite universities protect themselves, or that ambition becomes grotesque when drenched in money. His sharper insight is that institutions teach desire by arranging rewards. They teach students what to want by showing them who gets invited back.

That is why the book is especially good on the seduction of being recognized too soon. Premature exceptionality is not only flattering; it can be distorting. To tell young people they are future rulers is to alter the scale on which they measure obligation. Baker’s Stanford is full of people invited to imagine themselves at world-historical size before they have had much practice being accountable at human scale.

The target is not ambition. It is ambition fed on inevitability.

That distinction gives the Tessier-Lavigne material its larger charge. The president’s story is not a scandal subplot stitched onto a portrait of undergraduate startup culture. It plays the same lesson in a darker key. In the student world, reputation arrives early and acts like prophecy. In the adult world, reputation arrives with armor. Baker is careful enough to understand that individual wrongdoing, lab oversight, authorship responsibility, scientific correction, and university self-protection are not the same phenomenon. But he is also clear-eyed about how those distinctions can become a fog machine when too much prestige is at stake.

Baker’s youth will divide readers. Some will see it as the book’s great advantage: the astonishment is fresh, the access unusual, the ethical alarm not yet sanded down by professional exhaustion. Others may find the perspective narrow but intense, too eager to make one campus confess for too much. Both reactions have merit. “How to Rule the World” is not a slow institutional history written from a mountaintop after decades of archival digestion. It is a book written close to the heat source. Its closeness gives it heat, and heat, as every lab should know, distorts the air.

The book does not need a trend-piece corsage pinned to its jacket. It arrives when trust in elite institutions, scientific authority, higher education, and tech leadership is already frayed, but Baker is not useful because he confirms public suspicion. He is useful because he shows how suspicion can be earned by particulars: a byline, a source, a dinner, a lab record, a lawyer’s letter, a room to which not everyone is invited. Books about institutional failure can become permission slips for cynicism with its shoes off: everything is rotten, everyone is bought, all prestige is theater, bring snacks. Baker’s better instinct resists that flattening. He is interested not only in exposure but in formation. His question is not merely who behaved badly. It is what kind of world trains people to behave this way while calling the result excellence.

The answer has bite, reach, and occasionally the faint overconfidence of a sophomore who has found one excellent key and is trying it in every lock. That overconfidence is not fatal. It may even be part of the book’s charge. A work this readable can carry a surprising amount of diagnosis. Baker understands pace, contrast, and the usefulness of placing a ridiculous detail beside a serious one. His comic eye keeps the book from becoming a lecture; his investigative spine keeps it from becoming a gossip tour; his unease keeps it from becoming a brochure for the very spell it is trying to break.

Its weakness is proportional: Stanford can reveal a great deal, but it cannot be made to confess for everything. The university Baker describes is specific enough to matter: its money, geography, scientific prestige, venture proximity, alumni mythology, and culture of exceptionalism all shape the book’s argument. When those particulars breathe, the critique is sharp and persuasive. When the book leans toward grand totality, it begins to sound a little too eager to graduate itself with honors.

That strain is inseparable from the ambition. Baker has not written a modest account of a campus newspaper investigation, though he could have. He has written a more unstable and more interesting book about what status looks like to someone young enough to be startled by its manners and stubborn enough to test its locks. Its flaws come from appetite, not laziness. They are the costs of trying to make one freshman year hold a whole education in prestige, money, science, journalism, and consequence.

My final rating is 86/100, which translates to 4/5 Goodreads stars: a strong, sharp, sometimes overextended work of narrative nonfiction whose best pages understand that the most important lessons at elite institutions are often the ones least officially assigned.

Baker’s title works because it is both joke and warning. “How to Rule the World” is not really a manual, except for the reader determined to learn the wrong lesson. It is a tour of the hidden classroom where status checks its reflection, straightens its blazer, and calls the lesson leadership. Baker’s achievement is to stand at the back of that room, take notes, and notice that the door was never as closed as everyone pretended.

[Kevin Connolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

If even half of what this kid wrote about how Stanford handled the Marc Tessier-Lavigne affair is true, everyone involved on the Stanford side of the affair should resign in shame. It's mind-boggling that a university could treat one of its students so poorly, let alone one with the clout that Stanford has. Unfortunately, as Baker has exposed, an actual ethical core is a rare commodity at Stanford. And if you enter Stanford with one, as Baker also shows, you have to do a million contortions to make sure Stanford doesn't rip it right out of you.

[squidcanread · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review incoming.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could not put it down!