How to Rule the World
An Education in Power at Stanford University
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 19, 2026
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this fascinating investigation, journalist Theo Baker examines the complicated power structures behind Stanford University’s outsized influence in business and tech. Baker witnessed the school’s prestigious computer science program himself when he enrolled in it as an undergrad. But as a reporter at the school’s student-run newspaper, he began asking questions about what he saw—questions about omnipresent venture capitalists, connections to Silicon Valley, and potentially falsified research authored by university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. (Baker really kicked a hornet’s nest with that last one.) What emerges is a portrait of an institution where immense wealth and powerful relationships can make accountability feel frustratingly elusive, particularly when it comes to long-standing allegations of research misconduct. How to Rule the World offers a revealing look at what happens when knowledge and innovation struggle to keep pace with greed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this incendiary account, debut author Baker details how a tip he received as a freshman student journalist at Stanford University led to the resignation of university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of political reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, enrolled at Stanford in 2022 planning to study computer science. He joined the student newspaper as a hobby, but it became something more when a friend alerted Baker to a years-old blog post suggesting that one of Tessier-Lavigne's published neurobiology papers included a falsified image. Pulling on that thread, Baker reported a series of stories alleging that Tessier-Lavigne was complicit in publishing deceptive and misleading scientific research on multiple occasions. The university assembled a committee to investigate Baker's claims, and in 2023, Tessier-Lavigne resigned from his post—shortly after Baker became the youngest recipient of a Polk Award. Far from braggadocious, Baker is frank about the toll his reporting took on his social life and his faith in higher education; the book is at its most fascinating when detailing his disillusionment with the "rot" at the heart of academia that prizes the appearance of success over the truth. It's a confident testament to the power of independent journalism from an author with a bright future.
