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. By the end of the year, Tessier-Lavigne was out as president.
This is the incredible story of how a reluctant teenage reporter uncovered a scandal 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. Praise for HOW TO RULE THE WORLD:
"I am a sucker for books that illuminate cultures born of hubris, stories that make you say, 'I had no idea this world existed.' Theo Baker achieves this for several such worlds at the same time: Silicon Valley, 'Nerd Nation' (as Stanford calls itself), oligarchy, and precocious youth generally. 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
"How to Rule the World is the story of a young reporter unafraid to challenge Silicon Valley's billionaires and the powerful institutions that enable them-including his own university. Dogged, fearless, unflinching-Baker proves journalism's future is alive and fighting. Both a gripping personal journey and a searing indictment of our entanglement with tech wealth and influence, this book shows how real reporting can still unsettle, expose, and hold the powerful to account." -Emily Chang, national bestselling author and Emmy Award–winning journalist at Bloomberg Originals
"Theo Baker has written a page-turning drama about what happens when the search for scientific truth has to compete with personal and institutional power. His remarkable reporting has permanently changed the way we discuss research misconduct. Yet How to Rule the World is so much more. It's a vital story about how higher education has lost sight of the students and ideals it was created to serve." -Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science and former chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"In How to Rule the World, the wunderkind Theo
