How to Rule the World

byTheo Baker

An American Education

Format:

HardbackEbookAudio Download

Pre-order:

AmazonOpens in a new tabBlackwellsOpens in a new tabBookshop.orgOpens in a new tabFoylesOpens in a new tabHiveOpens in a new tabWaterstonesOpens in a new tabWHSmithOpens in a new tab

When seventeen-year old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University one brisk September morning, its manicured lawns, palm trees and sparkling fountains, all under azure Californian skies, provoked in him both wonderment and a sense of anticipation. After all, this legendary campus, where Rodin sculptures rub shoulders with nuclear laboratories, is where Silicon Valley was birthed. Its research park housed the headquarters of Facebook and Hewlett Packard, with venture capitalists a stone's throw away, ready to fund the next promising teenager's startup. With an annual budget eclipsing the budgets of 153 countries, yet a reputation for being laid-back and innovative, Stanford seemed like tech heaven. Instead, Baker discovered a cultural rot.

In this astonishing debut Baker recounts his freshman year mission to uncover the secrets behind Silicon Valley's training ground. He describes the Stanford inside Stanford, a strange, money-soaked subculture of infinite excess and access, afforded only to those special few students plucked from the crowd and expected to create billion dollar companies. And he documents a culture of getting ahead at any cost, of cut corners enabled and embraced. A culture that went to the very top. Baker's investigations for the student newspaper would soon place him in the impossibly difficult position of investigating his own university's president, a famous neuroscientist with a squeaky-clean reputation. By the end of his freshman year, after Baker's reporting revealed two decades of unreported research misconduct allegations, including in a study that claimed to have found the cause of degeneration in Alzheimer's patients, Stanford's president was forced to resign.

Both coming-of-age story and clear-eyed exposé, Baker takes us inside this elite American world like no other, revealing the ambitious, amoral, and at-times laughably absurd truth behind the institution training kids to rule the world.

I am a sucker for books that illuminate cultures born of hubris, stories that make you say, ‘I had no idea this world existed.’ Theo Baker achieves this for several such worlds at the same time: Silicon Valley, ‘Nerd Nation’ (as Stanford calls itself), oligarchy, and precocious youth generally. Poignant, maddening, and genuinely hilarious, How to Rule the World is to be devoured—and fast, before Stanford buys up and sets fire to every copy. (Talk about a burn book!)

Mark Leibovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town

About Theo Baker

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.
Details
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • ISBN: 9780241733912
  • Length: 256 pages
  • Price: £25.00
All editions