by Theo Baker
Penguin Press
5/19/2026, hardcover
SKU: 9780593832837
The instant New York Times bestseller
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.
Reviews:
"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
"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
"Theo Baker, an investigative journalist wunderkind and soon-to-be Stanford graduate, is not the first to trace Silicon Valley's rot to his university...But he is the first to document, with rigor and detail, the institution's recent history and culture...It reads like a memoir crossed with a spy thriller." -- Alex Bronzini-Vender, Washington Monthly
About the Author:
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.