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

Picture it: a seventeen-year-old freshman shows up at Stanford as a tech-obsessed coder, ready for paradise. Rodin sculptures beside nuclear labs. Inventors lounging with Olympians. And then? He starts asking questions.

This is the true, jaw-dropping story behind one of the biggest scandals in recent academic memory. Theo Baker, winner of the George Polk Award for the very investigation chronicled here, takes us inside Silicon Valley’s elite training ground—a place of slush funds, shell companies, and yacht parties for the chosen few.

Baker discovered that Stanford operated less like a school and more like a business, with an annual budget higher than 116 countries. The product? Students. Especially the rare ones tapped as future trillion-dollar founders, courted with secret societies and social calls from billionaires.

But when Baker joined the student paper and began poking around the university president’s research record, things got serious. Anonymous letters. Stakeouts. High-powered lawyers hired to silence him. By year’s end, the president was gone—and Baker had a front-page story that shook the scientific world.

As Mark Leibovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town, put it: “Poignant, maddening, and genuinely hilarious… to be devoured—and fast, before Stanford buys up and sets fire to every copy.”

Equal parts memoir, exposé, and coming-of-age tale, this debut is shocking, moving, and—yes—surprisingly funny.

Settle into a chair by the window, listen to the surf, and turn the first page. You won’t want to put it down.

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