Stanford's Dark Side: How a 21-Year-Old Exposed Silicon Valley's Rotten Core

Stanford University built its reputation on scrappy garage startups and world-changing innovation. Hewlett-Packard. Google. The mythology goes that genius flourishes here, that outsiders tinker their way to fortune and meaning. It’s the dream that drew Theo Baker to campus as a first-year student—a kid who loved technology, who wanted to build things no one had ever built before.

What he found instead was something far uglier.

Baker’s new memoir, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, reads like a coming-of-age story that turns into an exposé halfway through. The book follows his first year on campus, peppered with the usual rites of passage: his grandfathers’deaths, a fading long-distance relationship, new friendships. But beneath that veneer lies what Baker calls“the Stanford within Stanford”—an insular world where venture capitalists prowl undergraduate lounges handing out“pre-idea funding”to kids with barely an idea, where exclusive clubs bankroll yachts and resort parties for the tech-obsessed elite, and where cutting ethical corners isn’t a bug in the system, it’s a feature.

The real story, though, came from a tip: Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had overseen multiple research papers with falsified data. Tessier-Lavigne hadn’t faked the data himself, but he’d failed to verify it—even as he’d previously taken credit for promising Alzheimer’s research his team produced. Baker, drawing on skills he’d clearly inherited from his parents (Washington correspondents Peter Baker and Susan Glasser), methodically reported the story for the Stanford Daily. He cross-checked sources independently, dug into conflicts of interest, even asked deliberately false leading questions to test whether people would go along. When Tessier-Lavigne ultimately resigned in 2023, Baker, still an undergraduate, won the 2022 George Polk Award for his reporting—one of journalism’s highest honors.

But the real horror in How to Rule the World isn’t just the scandal. It’s the casual admissions Baker heard in Stanford’s inner circles. People in the tech world would openly confess to him about tax evasion, research misconduct, embezzlement, securities fraud, insider trading, and worse. Billionaires visited campus and declared flatly that 150 men run the world, that politicians are puppets, and that success means aggregating enough capital to reallocate it according to your worldview. This isn’t Silicon Valley’s public face—the helpful innovation, the world-changing rhetoric. This is what they actually believe when they’re among their own. And Stanford, the book suggests, is where this ideology gets baked into the next generation of tech leaders.

Baker’s memoir works because it holds two truths in tension: a genuine story of a young person learning to be a journalist, and a portrait of an institution that’s stopped even pretending to value anything beyond wealth and power. The Party Review Committee’s excessive regulations seemed absurd to a first-year who didn’t know about Brock Turner’s 2015 rape conviction on Stanford’s campus—a crime that revealed how the university had spent years burying troubling truths to protect its image. Baker’s investigation into Tessier-Lavigne was just the beginning of what his book makes clear is a much larger rot.

At 21, Theo Baker has already reported what many seasoned journalists might never attempt. What makes How to Rule the World essential isn’t just that he won a Polk Award. It’s that he documented, in real time, how the most prestigious institution for training tech’s future leaders had become a cautionary tale—a machine for polishing ambition without ethics, for cultivating power without accountability. Stanford was supposed to be the cradle of innovation. Instead, it’s revealed itself as something far more sinister: the finishing school for a generation that’s decided the world exists to be ruled, not improved.