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

Baker, Theo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593832833 ISBN 13: 9780593832837

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

The instant New York Times bestseller • A Tom Wolfe Literary Prize finalist • Named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by New York Times, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Apple Books

“A rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that ‘sets the agenda for the planet’ . . . in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle Liar’s Poker.” —The New York Times

“A romp and rollick of a read.” —Andrew Ross Sorkin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1929

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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Chapter 1

Drafted to the War on Fun

Stanford is supposed to look perfect.

From the sweeping, manicured lawns of pristine chromatic green, to the palm trees and hulking glass auditoriums that frame historic archways, to the sparkling blue-water fountains, chlorinated so students can splash around beneath the California sun, it's all curated to leave an impression of wonder. Stanford is an oasis, a place where Rodin sculptures stand next to nuclear laboratories. It is gorgeous, expansive, and, most of all, imposing.

I arrived for my first day of college on a brisk September morning in 2022 full of nervous energy. I could recite the Stanford propaganda by heart. I'd watched all the videos, read the entire course catalog, and eagerly devoured research papers from a dozen different labs. Now I took it all in, the pine-and-eucalyptus-scented air, the seagulls perched atop terra-cotta-tiled roofs. My hand trembled slightly as I opened the door of my family's rental car. For some reason, the student orientation coordinators were wearing cow costumes as they jumped up and down to greet us.

Stanford had been my dream since I was seven, much to the surprise of everyone around me on the East Coast. I'd fallen in love with the notion that all this genius had been concentrated in one institution, coming together to reshape the world. "Buzzing with ideas and innovation, approaching questions with openness and curiosity, pursuing excellence in all we do-this is Stanford," the school's website claimed. Things were happening out there.

I wanted to be part of them.

It wasn't just the tech or the innovation. Stanford combined excellence with a quirky, freewheeling attitude that set it apart from its competitors. Students constructed makeshift boats to traverse Lake Lagunita and built motorized couches to get to class. Irreverence was said to be an integral part of the experience. When students graduated, they participated in the Wacky Walk. Instead of wearing staid black robes into commencement, graduates donned satirical costumes, teaming up to construct a Stanford-themed pirate ship, wearing cardboard representations of their favorite campus street signs, or dressing as Stanford "Cardinals," pairing the school's signature Cardinal Red with a play on Catholic iconography.

I loved the idea that Stanford, despite its competitive excellence, had somehow still retained the reputation of being laid-back, chill. The campus was designed to be isolated, offering a reprieve from the real world where students could go about the business of brilliance and have a good time doing so. Who wouldn't want to go to a perfect-looking place full of perfect-looking people, glowing beneath perennially blue skies?

This was the promise of Stanford: beauty, idiosyncrasy, perfection.


It took twenty minutes to drive from the campus entrance to my dorm. The snaking caravan of halting, overstuffed SUVs seemed endless. Nobody seemed to know how to use a roundabout. But it gave me a good chance to observe.

Students experienced every possible emotion all at once. Some cried and hugged their parents; some buzzed with enthusiasm; others were taciturn, almost in shock. I understood the feeling. Moving to a campus three thousand miles from home where I knew almost no one was intimidating. I was grateful for the opportunity, still pinching myself that this place would be my home. I didn't want to mess it up.

One of the first orders of business was to buy a bike, as walking from the door of my dorm to the edge of Palo Alto took an hour. On a campus of 8,180 acres, with an undergraduate population of just eight thousand, everything was spread out.

Soon I was situated on an overpriced hunter-green cruiser from the bike store, ready to take it for a spin. I biked past the class buildings that would soon be my lecture halls, noting that they all bore names like Gates (as in Bill) and Huang (as in Jensen), each containing tributes to inventions born at the Farm. A solar car built by students hung suspended from the ceiling in one engineering complex. Another building had a three-story atrium made completely of glass-every wall, even the roof.

At the edge of the engineering quad, two large buildings faced one another: Hewlett and Packard. They proudly marked the origin story of Stanford's greatness-brilliant students, William Hewlett and David Packard, who founded their company in a garage in 1938 with $538, creating what would ultimately become Silicon Valley. Now those of us who set foot inside their classrooms were expected to follow the Stanford example.


At my dorm, things were less daunting. Alondra, named for the Spanish word for “lark,” was three stories of reassuringly mundane drabness. Whereas the Stanford presented to the outside world was all glam, Alondra, a 1950s building with carpets overdue for a refresh, could’ve passed for practically any college dorm in America. There were shared bathrooms that would never again be so clean, common spaces with a piano and an oddly slanted pool table, and thin-walled rooms each containing a bookcase, a desk, a bed, and little else.

Because everyone lives on campus all four years-Palo Alto is ridiculously expensive-and because everything at Stanford is so damn far away, where you live has a dramatic effect on your life. Dorm culture can vary wildly. There are the co-ops, like Synergy, the nudist dorm; Enchanted Broccoli Forest, where weed reigns supreme; and Terra, where the judgy gays go. There are row houses, reserved mostly for social seniors, and apartment-style buildings, where nothing ever happens. But I was in a much stranger, much rarer environment: a haven of humanities.

For the next year, I would take a set of classes alongside the people I lived with, in addition to my regular coursework. The program I had signed up for was named the Structured Liberal Education, but everyone called it SLE (pronounced slee), and it was basically a Great Books course: a commitment to read at least a book a week throughout freshman year, from Gilgamesh and Sappho to Sartre and Arendt.

My plan for Stanford was to focus on computer science, but I'd decided to balance this out with SLE, intent on seeing many sides of campus. This was a more important choice than I realized at the time.

I learned quickly that Alondra was nicknamed "the Nerd Dorm" by other students-which said something at a university that openly called itself "Nerd Nation." (Yeah, really.) Living alongside me were the reigning American women's chess champion, the author of a calculus textbook (as she mentioned frequently), a Hong Kong heiress, a cerebral day trader who'd made hundreds of thousands of dollars in high school, and three world-class pianists. And also a son of undocumented immigrants and the lesbian daughter of a member of the right-wing Proud Boys who grew up in a trailer park.

Most intriguingly, the woman assigned to the room next door to mine had the same name as my long-distance girlfriend from high school, Lily Zhou. That seemed like a sign from the universe, though of what I hadn't a clue.

That night, I felt a surge of cautious optimism as I took in my barely furnished dorm room. The possibilities were endless.

Orientation proved to be a study in contrasts. I met one kid whose parents had bought him a multimillion-dollar house just off campus, so he could have friends over or do his laundry when he needed a break from school. "You don't have a guest house?" another student asked me incredulously. She was seriously shocked. I was the one shocked when a different student asked me, "Why are all Jews so rich?" Over the next few weeks, some of my more sheltered classmates repeatedly asked how to operate those strange, mystical devices known as laundry machines. Several had to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593832833
• ISBN 13: 9780593832837
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Random House LLC; penguinrandomhouse@penguinrandomhouse.com; ; 1745 Broadway; New York; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland