How to Rule the World

'A thrilling story of journalistic investigation . . . Baker’s undeniable talent might make me sick with envy, but the truly nauseating thing here is the moral void he sketches at the heart of the tech world' Sarah Ditum, The Times A searing critique of the crony-capitalist, talent-scraping culture of the Stanford elites, by a brilliant young journalist When seventeen-year old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University one brisk September morning, its manicured lawns, palm trees and sparkling fountains, all under azure Californian skies, provoked in him both wonderment and a sense of anticipation. After all, this legendary campus, where Rodin sculptures rub shoulders with nuclear laboratories, is where Silicon Valley was birthed. Its research park housed the headquarters of Facebook and Hewlett Packard, with venture capitalists a stone's throw away, ready to fund the next promising teenager's startup. With an annual budget eclipsing the budgets of 116 countries, yet a reputation for being laid-back and innovative, Stanford seemed like tech heaven. Instead, Baker discovered a cultural rot. In this astonishing debut Baker recounts his freshman year mission to uncover the secrets behind Silicon Valley's training ground. He describes the Stanford inside Stanford, a strange, money-soaked subculture of infinite excess and access, afforded only to those special few students plucked from the crowd and expected to create billion dollar companies. And he documents a culture of getting ahead at any cost, of cut corners enabled and embraced. A culture that went to the very top. Baker's investigations for the student newspaper would soon place him in the impossibly difficult position of investigating his own university's president, a famous neuroscientist with a squeaky-clean reputation. By the end of his freshman year, after Baker's reporting revealed two decades of unreported research misconduct allegations, including in a study that claimed to have found the cause of degeneration in Alzheimer's patients, Stanford's president was forced to resign. Both coming-of-age story and clear-eyed exposé, Baker takes us inside this elite American world like no other, revealing the ambitious, amoral, and at-times laughably absurd truth behind the institution training kids to rule the world.

'A thrilling story of journalistic investigation . . . Baker’s undeniable talent might make me sick with envy, but the truly nauseating thing here is the moral void he sketches at the heart of the tech world' Sarah Ditum, The Times A searing critique of the crony-capitalist, talent-scraping culture of the Stanford elites, by a brilliant young journalist When seventeen-year old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University one brisk September morning, its manicured lawns, palm trees and sparkling fountains, all under azure Californian skies, provoked in him both wonderment and a sense of anticipation. After all, this legendary campus, where Rodin sculptures rub shoulders with nuclear laboratories, is where Silicon Valley was birthed. Its research park housed the headquarters of Facebook and Hewlett Packard, with venture capitalists a stone's throw away, ready to fund the next promising teenager's startup. With an annual budget eclipsing the budgets of 116 countries, yet a reputation for being laid-back and innovative, Stanford seemed like tech heaven. Instead, Baker discovered a cultural rot. In this astonishing debut Baker recounts his freshman year mission to uncover the secrets behind Silicon Valley's training ground. He describes the Stanford inside Stanford, a strange, money-soaked subculture of infinite excess and access, afforded only to those special few students plucked from the crowd and expected to create billion dollar companies. And he documents a culture of getting ahead at any cost, of cut corners enabled and embraced. A culture that went to the very top. Baker's investigations for the student newspaper would soon place him in the impossibly difficult position of investigating his own university's president, a famous neuroscientist with a squeaky-clean reputation. By the end of his freshman year, after Baker's reporting revealed two decades of unreported research misconduct allegations, including in a study that claimed to have found the cause of degeneration in Alzheimer's patients, Stanford's president was forced to resign. Both coming-of-age story and clear-eyed exposé, Baker takes us inside this elite American world like no other, revealing the ambitious, amoral, and at-times laughably absurd truth behind the institution training kids to rule the world.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times "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, #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town 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.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times "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, #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town 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.