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

Theo Baker’s 2026 nonfiction book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, is a work of investigative journalism and a coming-of-age memoir. The book chronicles Baker’s freshman year at Stanford University, where his initial ambition to become a coder in Silicon Valley is sidetracked when he joins the student newspaper. A series of investigations pulls him deeper into a campus culture defined by ethical decay, culminating in his reporting on allegations of scientific misconduct against the university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Through this narrative, Baker examines themes of Institutional Protection Over Accountability, The Commodification of Talent, and Silicon Valley’s Illusion of Meritocracy.

How to Rule the World is Baker’s debut book, expanding upon the reporting he originally published in The Stanford Daily. For his series of articles in the university paper, Baker won the 2022 George Polk Award for Local Reporting, becoming the youngest recipient in the award’s history. Prior to the book’s publication, Warner Bros. acquired the film rights to Baker’s life story and his investigation in a competitive bidding war, with Amy Pascal set to produce.

This guide refers to the 2026 Penguin Press edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide feature depictions of death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, substance use, addiction, mental illness, cursing, sexual harassment, sexual content, racism, gender discrimination, and religious discrimination.

Summary

Theo Baker arrives at Stanford University as a freshman, eager to pursue his passion for coding and become a technical builder at the forefront of innovation in Silicon Valley. To honor his late grandfather, Steve Glasser, who loved his own time at a college newspaper, Baker joins The Stanford Daily as a side project. His first article investigates the university’s restrictive social policies, dubbed the “War on Fun” (20), detailing how a bureaucratic Party Review Committee has stifled campus life. This piece earns him notice, and he follows it with a deeper investigation into William Curry, an impostor who lived undetected in various dorms on the Stanford campus for over a year. Theo’s reporting reveals that Stanford’s administration knew about Curry but failed to warn the community despite reports of harassment and threats—a story that brings Baker national attention. Simultaneously, Baker immerses himself in the elite tech culture, taking the grueling computer science weeder course CS107 and gaining admission to TreeHacks, an exclusive, high-prestige hackathon club that is a talent funnel for venture capitalists. Through TreeHacks, he experiences the “Stanford inside Stanford” (5)—a world of lavish mansion retreats, VC-funded dinners, and a bottomless “black hole budget” (69).

As Baker navigates these two worlds, he feels increasingly pulled toward journalism. A tip from a Stanford alum leads him to PubPeer, a website where scientists critique published research, and he discovers allegations of image manipulation in papers coauthored by Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne (MTL). Baker contacts Elisabeth Bik, a renowned Dutch microbiologist and scientific-integrity expert, who confirms that several of MTL’s papers contain “serious concerns,” including altered images that suggest “an intent to mislead.” (85) Soon after, an anonymous letter arrives at Baker’s door, hinting at a major research misconduct incident at the biotech giant Genentech, where MTL was a top executive before becoming Stanford’s president. Baker focuses on the Genentech lead, eventually securing a meeting with a high-level executive who breaks his nondisclosure agreement to speak.

The executive, along with several other senior Genentech sources Baker later finds, reveals the story: MTL’s celebrated 2009 Nature paper, which claimed to have discovered a cause of Alzheimer’s disease, was found by an internal Genentech review to be based on fabricated data. The investigation implicated the study’s first author, a postdoc named Anatoly Nikolaev, who was subsequently quietly dismissed from the company. According to the sources, senior leaders, including MTL’s friend Richard Scheller, urged MTL to retract the fraudulent study, but he refused, effectively covering up the incident. This investigation consumes Baker’s life. He neglects his coursework, even failing to complete CS107’s final assignment. His long-distance relationship with his high school girlfriend, Lily, falls apart. The weight of his reporting, combined with the recent deaths of both of his grandfathers and a close family friend, Blake Hounshell, takes a severe mental and physical toll. Meanwhile, prompted by Baker’s initial reporting, Stanford’s Board of Trustees opens its own investigation into MTL’s research. As Baker prepares to publish the story detailing MTL and Genetech’s misconduct, he is bombarded with aggressive legal threats from Steve Neal, MTL’s high-powered attorney, who declares the allegations “completely and utterly false” (219).

Just before publishing the Genentech story, he receives a call informing him he has won a George Polk Award, becoming the youngest recipient in the award’s history and gaining an important dose of external validation. He publishes the investigation—headlined “Internal Review Found ‘Falsified Data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s Research, Colleagues Allege” (213)—while simultaneously helping to run a massive, weekend-long TreeHacks event. The immense pressure culminates in physical and mental exhaustion that causes him to collapse at the event. The external pressure continues to mount exacerbating his internal distress, prompting him to take his late grandfather’s oxycodone for relief. He suffers a near-fatal overdose, surviving only because he manages to self-administer a dose of Narcan before losing consciousness. 

In the aftermath, MTL publicly denounces Theo’s reporting, but his defense unravels as Genentech releases a formal statement confirming key elements of the story, including that senior leaders knew of “inconsistent binding results” (253) prior to the paper’s publication, which prompted a senior colleague to urge retraction. In July 2023, the Stanford board’s special committee releases its final, 95-page report. While it absolves MTL of personally committing fraud, it confirms “apparent manipulation of research data by others” (284) in at least four of the five major papers that came from his labs and concludes that he “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.” (285) The board forces him to resign. Ultimately, four of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers are retracted, including the 2009 Alzheimer’s study. Baker returns for his sophomore year with new Stanford leadership pledging reform. His identity has been irrevocably changed from an aspiring coder to a committed investigative journalist. Baker notes that, despite his ouster, Tessier-Lavigne leverages his reputation to raise $1 billion for a new AI-biotech startup, Xaira, proving that in Silicon Valley, the systems of power and money continue to reward their own.