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

The instant New York Times bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Apple Books

"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

From Theo Baker, winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford's president, comes 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.

Theo Baker is an undergraduate at Stanford University. His reporting led to former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation and made Baker the youngest-ever recipient of the prestigious George Polk Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York magazine, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He will graduate from Stanford in June 2026.

“A rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that ‘sets the agenda for the planet.’ In every age, there is some place that epitomizes how power works. Baker’s Stanford is a strong candidate, and his book follows in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle Liar’s Poker. . . In coming of age as a young man, he travels to the heart of a dehumanizing age.” —Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times

“Either of these two narratives—the wide-eyed novice’s glimpse of Stanford’s elites; the reporter’s tale of chasing down leads, landing essential sources, wrapping his head around the ethics of scientific research, and fending off the threats of high-powered lawyers—would make a pretty good book. Together, they amount to a terrific read. Baker’s account of assembling the Tessier-Lavigne reporting illustrates how meticulous investigative journalists work. . . How to Rule the World is a coming-of-age story, a campus story, and a newspaper story, but above all, it’s a horror story.” —Laura Miller, Slate

“What a journalist. 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.” —Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle

“The Bonfire of the VCs . . . A vivid, dishy exposé of the sometimes comical, at times seemingly corrupt, efforts by tech funders to seduce undergraduates who smell like future moguls and geniuses, and vice versa.” —Axios

“A romp and rollick of a read.” —Andrew Ross Sorkin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1929

“As 21-year-old Baker describes in his engrossing coming-of-age book, Stanford’s Faustian bargain with extreme wealth has corrupted its soul. . . racily written . . . [and a] painstakingly reported exposé.” —John Thornhill, Financial Times

“A scorching portrait of a university infiltrated by venture capital and tech firms.” —The New York Times

“How to Rule the World [is] a gripping book . . . offering a blow-by-blow account of [Baker's] investigation and ... the university’s culture of excess and cronyism.” —Parmy Olson, Bloomberg

“Baker’s book is a thrilling story of journalistic investigation: effectively, it’s All the President’s Men as a campus novel. . . Every one of us now lives in the domain of Stanford’s self-styled Übermenschen. 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

“Armed with natural curiosity, [Baker] uncovered a shadow Stanford designed to funnel our best and brightest away from Descartes and Shakespeare and toward Silicon Valley’s billionaires. . . Baker’s investigation for the Stanford Daily toppled the university’s money-tainted president and won him the coveted George Polk award, expanded here in a briskly written, Gen-Z morality tale.” —Hamilton Cain, TIME
“Theo Baker’s blockbuster new book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, has won wide praise for offering a nuanced insider’s look at a towering academic institution beset by ethical challenges.” —Norman Vanamee, Town & Country

"[How to Rule the World] follows in the tradition of “One L”, Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law School, and William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale”, a jeremiad against that university’s leftward drift... In decrying Stanford’s thrall to money and power, Mr Baker’s book also testifies to the importance of good local journalism to hold that money and power to account.” —The Economist
“The determination, resourcefulness and sheer courage shown by a young man who turned 18 in the course of that year is remarkable...For all its narrative dash, the true significance of Baker’s book lies not in the story of a brave student journalist nor in the size of the scalp he eventually claimed, but in what it reveals about th