How a Stanford Freshman Took Down a President and Exposed Silicon Valley’s Power Machine
In the fall of 2022, Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University as a 17-year-old freshman with ambitions that looked familiar to anyone who has spent time around Silicon Valley. He wanted to code, build things, and plug into the innovation engine that has turned the campus into one of the most powerful talent pipelines on the planet. What he found instead was a parallel world of influence, money, and ethical shortcuts that would reshape his college years and eventually force the resignation of the university’s president.
Baker’s story is now told in How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, published in May 2026 by Penguin Press. The book is part investigative chronicle, part campus ethnography, and part personal reckoning. At its center sits the reporting Baker did as a first-year student for The Stanford Daily that brought down Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the celebrated neuroscientist then serving as Stanford’s president. Around that central drama, Baker maps a broader culture he calls “Stanford inside Stanford”—an informal network where venture capitalists and tech executives identify and cultivate the next generation of founders almost as soon as they set foot on campus.
The Investigation That Started with Images
Baker did not set out to become a journalist. The son of two prominent reporters—Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker—he initially viewed the student newspaper as a side interest. Early in his freshman year, a tip led him to online scientific forums where researchers had long flagged problems in papers co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne. The issues centered on images that appeared duplicated, spliced, or otherwise manipulated across multiple studies, some of them tied to Alzheimer’s research conducted while Tessier-Lavigne held a senior role at Genentech.
What followed was a classic piece of student investigative work carried out with unusual determination. Baker contacted independent experts who specialize in detecting image manipulation. He tracked down former Genentech researchers constrained by nondisclosure agreements. He documented patterns stretching across two decades of published science. His first articles in The Stanford Daily in late 2022 immediately drew attention—and resistance. Tessier-Lavigne’s lawyers sent strongly worded letters. University officials and board members moved quickly to open their own investigation.
By July 2023, a formal review concluded that multiple papers associated with Tessier-Lavigne contained serious flaws and that scientific standards had not been met. Tessier-Lavigne resigned as president while remaining on the faculty. He later requested retractions or corrections for several papers. Baker’s reporting earned him a special George Polk Award, making him the youngest person ever to receive the prize and the first from a student publication. The achievement was striking not only for his age but for the institutional weight of the target.
A Culture Built for the Next Unicorn
The Tessier-Lavigne case forms the narrative spine of the book, yet Baker’s larger argument concerns the environment that produced both the scandal and the reaction to it. Stanford, he writes, has become increasingly corporate. Its proximity to Silicon Valley has created a symbiotic relationship in which the university supplies talent and credibility while venture capital supplies money, mentorship, and social status. The result is a dual campus: the official one of classes and laboratories, and an unofficial one of yacht parties, private dinners, and early access to capital.
In this second world, freshmen are especially valuable. Upperclassmen who have not already been “discovered” are often considered less interesting. Promising students are courted with advice, introductions, and sometimes cash. Baker describes being treated less as a student and more as a potential asset almost from his first weeks on campus. One of the purest expressions of this culture is a secretive, unofficial seminar titled “How to Rule the World.” Taught by a Silicon Valley CEO Baker refers to as Justin, the group admits roughly a dozen students each year. There is no course credit. Admission itself functions as a status marker. Participants describe sessions focused on frameworks of influence, unbound ambition, and ways of extracting value that are not always transparent.
Baker never gained entry to the seminar, but he interviewed enough people who did to sketch its contours. The class, he suggests, is less an academic exercise than a finishing school for those expected to operate at the highest levels of tech power. Knowing the seminar exists is itself a signal that someone is “rule-adjacent.”
Ethics, Impunity, and the Aftermath
Baker is careful not to claim that every ambitious Stanford student is corrupt. His point is structural. A system that prizes rapid success, outsized returns, and personal branding creates incentives that can erode ordinary checks. In candid conversations, some of the tech-world figures he encountered admitted to practices ranging from tax problems and research misconduct to the use of shell companies and more serious ethical breaches. The university, in Baker’s telling, has made a Faustian bargain: enormous resources and influence in exchange for a culture that often treats accountability as secondary.
The aftermath of Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation illustrates the resilience of that system. Shortly after stepping down, the former president closed on a large mansion. He later raised approximately $1 billion for a new biotech company. In a moment Baker presents as both surprising and inevitable, one of the investors in that venture reached out to him with an offer of funding if he ever wanted to start a company of his own. “I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been,” Baker writes. “That’s how this place works.”
The book also places the episode in a longer pattern. Stanford has produced or been closely associated with a series of high-profile figures whose stories later soured—Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos being the most famous example. Baker does not argue that the university is uniquely responsible for such outcomes. He argues that its particular blend of prestige, capital, and limited friction makes certain kinds of overreach more likely and less costly when they occur.
A Young Reporter’s Education in Power
How to Rule the World succeeds because it refuses to stay in any single lane. It is a detailed account of how a teenager with limited institutional power forced a major reckoning through careful sourcing, persistence, and public reporting. It is also a clear-eyed description of how elite universities and the venture capital industry have become intertwined in ways that shape not only individual careers but the broader culture of American innovation and ambition.
Baker does not present himself as a pure outsider or a moral crusader. He arrived wanting to participate in the world he later scrutinized. The tension between those two impulses runs through the book and gives it texture. By the time he graduated in 2026, his relationship to Stanford and to Silicon Valley had grown complicated. The institution that elevated him had also tried, at times, to contain the consequences of his work.
For readers interested in higher education, scientific integrity, the talent pipelines of tech, or the mechanics of power among the young and highly ambitious, the book offers an unusually intimate view. It shows how a single determined student reporter can still surface uncomfortable truths. It also shows how quickly those truths can be absorbed by a system designed to keep moving. The scandal that forced a university president from office did not fundamentally alter the incentives that produced it. In Baker’s account, that continuity may be the most revealing finding of all.
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