How to Rule the World

In the fall of 2022, Theodore Baker, a seventeen-year-old coder, arrived at Stanford University as a freshman with a plan: study computer science, immerse himself in the tech world, and contribute to the innovation ecosystem that has made Silicon Valley the most powerful economic engine on the planet. Within months, that plan was upended. Baker found himself drawn into investigative journalism, uncovering misconduct at the highest levels of the university and gaining an insider's view of a culture that rewards ambition, tolerates fraud, and treats teenagers as commodities. How to Rule the World is Baker's account of his freshman year, presenting a collision between two worlds: the exclusive insider network grooming Stanford students to become Silicon Valley's next billionaires, and the investigative reporting that consumed his college experience and ultimately forced the resignation of Stanford's president.

Baker opens with his tryout for a secretive, invite-only class called "How to Rule the World," run by a Silicon Valley CEO named Justin. Justin promises to teach hidden frameworks that govern how the world works, knowledge he says was once available only to "the literal children of billionaires." Baker contextualizes this scene within Stanford's broader significance: the university sits at the center of a region whose public companies hold a cumulative market value of $14.3 trillion, and Stanford alumni have founded tens of thousands of companies, including Google, Netflix, Nike, and OpenAI. Once a regional school nicknamed "the Farm" after its founder's horse ranch, Stanford has transformed into a global juggernaut with a 3.6 percent admissions rate and annual revenues nearly twice those of Harvard or Yale.

Baker's first weeks on campus revealed a jarring contrast between Stanford's curated image and the reality underneath. He settled into a dorm called Alondra, nicknamed "the Nerd Dorm," as part of the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program, a Great Books residential curriculum. The traditional first party of the year was canceled by the administration, part of what students call the "War on Fun," a bureaucratic crackdown requiring weeks of advance paperwork and a "Harm Reduction Plan" to host any social event. Baker investigated and found that registered parties had dropped from 158 in the first weeks of fall 2019 to just 45 in the same period of 2022. His article, published on October 24, 2022, became The Stanford Daily's most-read piece of the year. Baker had joined The Daily partly to honor his grandfather Steve Glasser, who died two weeks before Stanford began and who had cherished his own college newspaper.

Baker enrolled in CS107, Stanford's notoriously demanding computer science course, as one of roughly half a dozen freshmen in a class of 300, struggling with impostor syndrome alongside most of his peers. Meanwhile, a tip led him to his second major story: William Curry, a recent high school graduate from Alabama who had been posing as a Stanford student and living in dorms since 2019. Baker's investigation revealed that Stanford had known about Curry since 2021 but never issued a campus warning, even after Curry's ex-girlfriend reported threatening messages. The story generated national media attention, and Baker appeared on Good Morning America.

Through TreeHacks, Stanford's premier hackathon, Baker gained entry to what he calls "the Stanford inside Stanford," an exclusive world of venture capital dinners, mansion parties, and insider access for students identified as future tech leaders. Baker describes a broader ecosystem of fixers, talent scouts, and aspiring entrepreneurs who hold court daily at Coupa Café, the campus meeting point for investors and students. Through six former students, he profiles the "How to Rule the World" class, revealing that Justin teaches 12 handpicked students per year frameworks for "extracting value" from others. Baker contrasts this with Steve Blank, the serial entrepreneur who runs the established Lean LaunchPad startup class and tells Baker, "We've lost the moral compass for what we invest into."

On November 1, 2022, a tip pointed Baker to PubPeer, an online forum where scientists scrutinize published research. He found comments dating to 2015 noting apparent image manipulation in studies listing Stanford's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, as a coauthor. Elisabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist renowned for reviewing more than 100,000 papers for signs of misconduct, analyzed nine of Tessier-Lavigne's papers and identified serious concerns in five. Baker published his first article on November 29, 2022. Within 12 hours, Stanford's board of trustees, chaired by Jerry Yang, announced an investigation. Baker discovered that one committee member held an $18 million investment in a company Tessier-Lavigne had cofounded; after Baker reported the conflict, the member stepped down.

Baker's breakthrough came through an executive at the biotech company Genentech who confirmed that Tessier-Lavigne's famous 2009 Nature paper, which proposed a novel pathway as a potential cause of Alzheimer's neurodegeneration, had been found by an internal company review to rely on fabricated data. Seven sources told Baker that Tessier-Lavigne was urged to retract the study but refused, instead publishing subsequent papers in lower-profile journals that quietly walked back the main claims without acknowledging problems with the original. When Baker sent questions to Tessier-Lavigne, the response came not from the president but from Steve Neal, chairman of Cooley, Silicon Valley's dominant law firm, who warned that publication would be "extremely reckless." On the night of February 16, 2023, after Daily lawyer Eric Stahl gave final approval, Baker's editor Sam pressed Publish. Tessier-Lavigne sent a statement to all faculty and staff calling the reporting "completely and utterly false," never mentioning that the allegations came from his own former colleagues.

Baker ran the TreeHacks event that same weekend, managing 1,700 competitors while fielding the fallout from his article. After days of near-total sleeplessness, he collapsed on the final night. Friends carried him to his dorm and paramedics were called. He woke the next morning with electrodes on his chest and no memory of what had happened.

The personal toll mounted throughout the year. Baker broke up with his long-distance girlfriend, Lily. On January 10, 2023, he learned that Blake Hounshell, his mother's closest professional partner and a constant presence throughout Baker's childhood, had died by suicide. Baker's second grandfather, Eleftherios "Ted" Baker, died in April 2023. After the George Polk Awards ceremony, where Baker became the youngest winner ever, he found a bottle of his late grandfather's oxycodone. Overwhelmed by grief, he took several pills. Weeks later, he overdosed and administered Narcan, an opioid-overdose reversal medication, from a kit a friend had given him. He survived and told no one except a doctor.

The 95-page investigation report, which Baker received at 3:00 a.m. in Berlin, found "apparent manipulation of research data" in at least four of five primary papers where Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author. The scientific panel found that Tessier-Lavigne had created a lab dynamic rewarding those who generated favorable results and marginalizing those who did not, which helped explain the "unusual frequency of manipulation." The panel concluded that he "failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record" over two decades and recommended all studies for retraction or substantial correction. Through subsequent reporting, Baker reveals that the board's vote to oust Tessier-Lavigne was unanimous. His aggressive legal posture, his failure to take accountability during seven meetings with investigators, and an incident in which he sidelined a younger female colleague whose work challenged his conclusions all influenced the decision. Tessier-Lavigne received a seven-figure payout.

In the aftermath, Stanford replaced its president, provost, dean of research, and several other top leaders. But Baker observes that "there remain vanishingly few safeguards in place discouraging bad behavior." Four days after his resignation was announced, Tessier-Lavigne closed on a mansion in Atherton, the most expensive zip code in America. Nine months later, he cofounded an AI drug-discovery company called Xaira, raising $1 billion. Baker reflects that Stanford has made a "Faustian bargain" with Silicon Valley, one that enabled its rise and allowed for its corruption. "It is precisely because I love Stanford," he writes, "that I wish it to be better."