How to Rule the World -- Theo Baker – 302 pages (320 with acknowledgments and notes)
Theo Baker arrived as a freshman student at Stanford University in the fall of 2022 planning on majoring in computer science. Within weeks, he had decided allocate some of his hobby time to working as a reporter for the school's newspaper, The Stanford Daily as a nostalgic nod to a recently departed grandfather who was interested in journalism. Baker's first three stories for the paper on three different topics attracted exponentially larger responses from the campus community and the larger world. Baker just graduated from Stanford in the spring of 2026 and wrote How to Rule the World as an analysis of the culture at Stanford that has morphed far away from one centered on academic excellence and scientific integrity to one fixated on monetizing ideas into extreme wealth for not only students and faculty but for Stanford itself. The forces described in Baker's book meld seamlessly with other stories of corruption and bubbles, with the Artificial Intelligence bubble being the most obvious and ominous.
It is worth pointing out before attempting to summarize the book and tie it to larger trends to simply state that Baker's book is highly recommended and worth the time to read it. Universities were already showing signs of decay from "publish or perish" mantras that were already pervasive in the 1980s. Readers who attended such schools thirty plus years ago will have no difficulty recognizing those forces at work in Baker's book but will be astonished at how that pressure has grown exponentially more intense given the decision by many universities to promote a business mindset among its faculty and the millions of dollars available to faculty who are willing tear down the wall of separation between academia and crass commerce. Readers with children attending elite institutions like Stanford will gain a much clearer understanding of the pressures applied to students from literally their first day on campus and the level of farce associated with previously promoted ideals about the purpose of a college education.
Theo Baker doesn't necessarily attempt to cover this much ground in the book himself, but his experiences and analysis easily blend into larger themes being discussed across current media. To explain those ties, the book itself will be summarized then tied to other trends seen in academic fraud, venture / vulture capital and "innovation" and more general business fraud and regulatory failure.
A Review in Brief
In the larger scheme of things, Theo Baker is probably not a typical recent college graduate. He applied and was accepted at Stanford University. He was able to graduate from Stanford in 2026. He actually has two fairly famous parents, Susan Glasser who writes for The New Yorker and Peter Baker who has worked at The Washington Post, The New York Times and MS NOW. It seems fair to presume he thus came from some financial means. But in the context of Stanford, Theo Baker was likely a very middle of the road student on campus -- just an "average" student in a place where all of the children are far above average.
This "averageness" is important to emphasize for several reasons. First, all of the events described were initiated by a first-year student working for a student paper who came across the topics randomly. The topics didn't take any superhuman skills of discovery or analysis to describe. They simply required someone to see them, not look away and write plainly about them.
In a nutshell, Baker came to Stanford planning to major in computer science and pursue a technical career. He was NOT interested in a career related to his parents' journalism jobs though he respected them and those roles. However, within a few weeks of arriving for his first fall semester, he decided to join the school newspaper as a reporter. He was randomly assigned stories as events cropped up on campus and each of his first three stories attracted exponentially more attention -- both on-campus and off -- than the prior story.
Three Key Story Arcs
The first story, published October 24, 2022, was titled Inside "Stanford's War on Fun" and described how policies first imposed by the administration during COVID lockdowns had been expanded into a more general paranoia about ANY student gatherings due to alcohol abuse, date rape, etc. and had subsequently destroyed any semblance of typical college life on campus. Baker's piece, written after he attended a typical dud party and spoke with "safety officials" assigned to enforce the rules, punctured the absurdity of the extreme policies by pointing out how many students were simply doing their drinking AWAY from the campus adding to DWI dangers or drinking ALONE in their dorms without anyone to stop a spiral.
The second big Baker story seemed to be a fluke unrelated to overblown "War on Fun" concerns about "safety." The story, Stanford knew about the campus imposter for a year. He kept coming back. was published October 31, 2022 as a follow-up to a story on October 28 that involved an incident where a man was found to be masquerading as a student living an empty dorm in the basement of one of the dorm buildings. In the October 28 story, campus officials described the incident as a one-off, nothing to see here. Baker did some follow-up that discovered the same man had engaged in the same poser scam MULTIPLE TIMES at Stanford. Those prior events had not been shared by officials nor mentioned when he was discovered again in 2022. This larger track record of an outside unknown party living inside dorm facilities punctured the university's prior attempts at preserving an image of an idyllic campus providing safety for all of its students, faculty and staff. Officials weren't just failing in their attempts, they were lying about prior incidents and memory-holing them.
Baker's third big story extended far beyond the Stanford campus in its reach. It started with an email from an alumni who had started following Baker's writing on the War on Fun. The alumni mentioned a comment in a blog post from a few years prior regarding concerns about several scientific papers involving drug research that were found to have duplicated photos included as multiple exhibits. Discovery of these types of frauds was becoming more common as more academic and scientific journals went online and made incidents of plagiarism and fraud easier to mechanically find. This tip was unique because one of the co-authors of the articles involved was Marc Tessier-Lavigne (MTL), the President of Stanford University.
The tip for the story arrived shortly after the imposter story but Baker did not immediately publish a story. He examined the original blog post with the allegation, reviewed the original articles at their original publication web site, compared the photos himself and sought technical counsel from established scientists. One called Baker back immediately, simply saying "Don't do this. Marc Tessier-Lavigne is unassailable, and you do not want to go after him." Over the next month, Baker contacted a microbiologist named Elisabeth Bik who had begun focusing on identifying scientific fraud specifically related to image fraud. A list of nine papers authored by MTL referenced in allegations was sent, she reviewed and found four had no real issues but the other five all had glaring signs of image manipulations, not to prettify the image for publication but to enhance positive observations or mask non-confirming observations in the article.
Based on that initial feedback, Baker wrote his piece, provided a copy to MTL for review prior to publication, was given nothing in response and published to the story on November 29, 2022, entitled Stanford president's research under investigation for scientific misconduct, University admits 'mistakes'. Between October 31, 2022 and December 31, 2023, Baker wrote a total of thirteen stories on the MTL saga that involved numerous concerns not only about MTL's integrity but that of the university administration as well.
- The fraud concerns over MTL's work pre-dated his hiring as president of Stanford and, per MTL, were communicated to the search committee by MTL yet the committee seemingly ignored them.
- In the rare cases where MTL responded to the paper's stories publicly, he did so using his official Stanford email address, presumably in an attempt to imply the university itself agreed with his claims and attempts to refute the allegations.
- The investigative team formed by the university administration refused to grant immunity to sources queried about the case.
- One participant in the investigation of MTL was forced to exit the review after it was found the participant held $18 million dollars in stock in a firm that MTL co-founded. The administration was too incompetent to identify such obvious conflicts of interest when forming the investigative panel in the first place.
- A 2009 paper co-authored by MTL during his employment at Genentech was cited in internal documents as foundational to Alzheimer products Genentech was developing which had triggered a pending buyout by Roche, a purchase that would net Genentech executives like MTL millions of dollars.
Of course, it is crucial to note that MTL did not receive a SEVERANCE package from Stanford. He only relinquished his role as president. He is still employed as a faculty member and continuing his "work" in neuroscience. He even has his own sub-domain within stanford.edu for his own lab where he publishes his own responses like these
Addressing questions and mistaken claims about my research
The persistence of inaccurate claims: a brief commentary on recent reporting in The Free Press
to questions about the scandal as they continue to pop up. It isn't clear exactly how much work he is actually doing, especially since he formed a new startup company Xaira Therapeutics in April 2024 which claims to be developing AI technologies to more efficiently search for new drug therapies -- "making biology more computable" as the firm's own web site states.
Perversely, an article in the Stanford Review -- Why Stanford Hides Massive Executive Paychecks In Secret Contracts -- did provide some clarity on how much Stanford continues to pay MTL. In 2025, he was paid roughly $2 million dollars in salary, presumably as part of a deferred compensation plan offered to many Stanford leaders, essentially shifting earlier compensation from his term as president into subsequent years to smooth out tax burdens like any other corporate pay package.
The Stanford Inside Stanford
The MTL story arc probably occupies about sixty percent of the entire book. The balance of the book addresses a variety of patterns and behaviors that Baker terms "the Stanford inside Stanford." That term sardonically expresses the conclusion Baker reached within weeks of joining the Stanford community that the exclusivity of the elite school seen from the outside is a mere fraction of the exclusivity experienced WITHIN the university, because of its decades-long incestuous partnership with the Silicon Valley business environment and a conscious decision by university administrators to actively promote this mode of operation.
Baker doesn't quite set the stage for his observations this way but this is the essence of what takes place at Stanford (and presumably at least a few other elite universities).
Imagine you are a venture capitalist with $20 million dollars looking for the next "10-bagger". An investment that will return 10x your initial angel investment. In theory, "angel investors" have expertise in some line of business, follow developments in that line and attempt to find individuals or firms in those lines who are investigating promising areas with business promise. Angel investing has very low odds but can have very high (10x, right?) payoffs. An angel investor MIGHT choose to take their $20 million and find twenty different individuals or firms and place a $1 million bet on each. If 19 burn through their million dollars and fail, well, it's a tough business. If just ONE of the bets gets traction and at least advances to IPO, that angel might own a large enough stake to net a 1x or 5x payout. If the IPO goes REALLY well, the angel might get their ten-bagger. That still leaves them at a 50% loss over the entire $20 million. If one company turns into a hundred-bagger, now the angel has lost $19 million but made $100 million, netting $81 million.
Now instead imagine you are an angel investor who has not only been very fortunate but has gotten lazy or complacent. You could spend each year scouring the country looking for your twenty candidate investments for your next $20 million. That's a lot of work. But what if you are located on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, California and have coffee every morning on campus at Stanford which traditionally recruits students from the top 1% of the country and typically has dozens of students graduate, form new companies and make millions (at least for a while) on new biotechnology, new software product ideas or new hardware advances? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just hang out at Stanford, suck up to the students and get them hitched to your wallet before any other investor has a chance to nab their ten-bagger? Come to think of it, a lot of these students don't seem to wait around to graduate before going into industry so you better start recruiting them early. How early? How about the first week of their freshman year?
THAT is the essence of the environment at Stanford described by Baker.
The book starts off with a glossary, providing tongue-in-cheek definitions of commonly heard terms on the Stanford campus. One term is wantapreneur, a term for a student who says they want to be a traditional entrepreneur who might take classes in accounting, financial management, marketing, etc. along with some core discipline to ensure they have a well rounded set of skills to operate a company from startup to established firm. At Stanford, wantapreneur is a term of derision. The top-tier students all profess to wanting to be builders because venture capitalists think they want geniuses who can spit out some quick idea that can be converted into a shell of a company to quickly shop it from angel phase to IPO to yield a quick cashout... For the angel investor... The angel investor cares nothing about the "genius" with the idea, they care nothing about the viability of the business past IPO or any of the investors in the IPO. They just want to turn a profit. (Theranos anyone?)
Another term Baker includes in his glossary is anti-signal, which describes a characteristic that, to the true insiders, means the opposite of what it means to outsiders. At Stanford, this moral-free philosophy and fixation on quick wealth is now common among students themselves and is invisibly re-enforced by a variety of secret organizations that quietly seek out those sharing the get-rich fixation and exclude students with a more grounded view of being an entrepreneur. The title of the book, How to Rule the World is actually drawn from the name of one such organization. Details are fuzzy but this organization was founded around 2018 by a junior at that time who might have originally been trying to offer an upper-classman's perspective to younger students on the realities of transitioning from student to entrepreneur and optimizing your wealth opportunities. However, that junior, identified as Justin Lewis-Weber, graduated in 2020 yet still operates this "club", requiring worthy new members to be chosen by prior members and screened by Lewis-Weber. Those selected not only take in the seminars but gain access to contacts for all prior selected members, offering a potentially lucrative set of connections.
Organizations like this may have started with more innocent aims and may have adopted such over-the-top names as a bit of college humor and sarcasm but the actual ideas now being pushed are notably more cynical and Machiavellian after multiple years. The leader of this particular "club" actually told Theo Baker "The only people who really understand the world are the literal children of billionaires." Well, so much for the rest of us.
The Larger Context
Baker's book focuses solely on his experiences as a student at Stanford and his reporting of issues involving Stanford but his observations reflect patterns of complacency and corruption that have spread throughout academia and business. These patterns have been the subject of multiple books over the past decade.
Self Preservation - The Only Mission That Counts
The book Bad City by reporter Paul Pringle summarized his multi-year effort on the staff of the Los Angeles Times to cover TWO stories involving the University of Southern California that eventually exposed corruption not only at the university but with the Pasadena Police Department and his own newspaper. The first story involved the dean of USC's medical school, Carmen Puliafitto, who was found to have paid to keep teen-aged girls in neighborhood motels, paid to keep them strung out on drugs and have used them for ongoing sex. His eventual outing started after one such girl overdosed in March of 2016 in a swanky hotel room rented in his name. He resigned three weeks later of his own accord but any public record of what had occured essentially vanished within the Pasadena PD the day of the incident.
The day after the death, Pringle received a tip from a worker at the hotel who described the scene, mentioned a man claiming to be a doctor at the scene, mentioned the man claiming that he was handling it and mentioned that Pasadena police ceded the scene to the "doctor" and didn't push public EMTs to command the scene. Pringle traced the room number and last name of Puliafitto, began investigating and spent over a year fighting with his own paper to publish an account of the people involved, what really happened and what didn't happen to save the victim. The Los Angeles Times management didn't want to piss off USC management, in part because USC is the single largest employer in the LA metro area and wields enormous economic clout in the region.
Pringle's second story involved a gynecologist George Tyndall who served on the staff of the USC campus medical facility for students. It was eventually discovered Tyndall was responsible for HUNDREDS of cases of rape and sexual abuse of patients and complaints of abuse, harassment and unprofessional conduct. Tyndall had been employed by USC since 1989 and complaints dated as far back as 1991 yet USC did nothing until another round of complaints from other staff in 2016 triggered internal investigations. USC eventually forced Tyndall to retire in 2017 and he was later arrested in 2018 by the LAPD. Again, Pringle's own paper was hesitant to publish the story because of USC's regional influence.
The unifying theme between the Pringle and Baker books is a pattern of large institutions becoming so inwardly focused to protect their own reputation and perceived interests that they become toxic to their surrounding communities. Beyond a certain size, nearly every institution - academic, corporate, charitable, or social -- becomes administratively warped to the point where self-preservation and perpetuation becomes the most important goal.
Cornering a Monopoly on Innovation
Prior commentaries on this blog regarding a Grand Unifying Theory on Creativity, Productivity and Specialization addressed trends over the past few decades with "innovation" in corporate settings. CEOs like to think as "innovation" as just another knob on their dashboard that can be cranked up or down, instantaneously, at will to solve a competitive problem or cut costs to juice quarterly profits to meet a bonus goal. At the core of that mindset is a fallacy that valuable ideas are just another inventory item waiting to be purchased on a just-in-time basis. They are most assuredly NOT.
Baker's anecdotes of student life at Stanford go beyond the absurdity of supposedly knowledgeable investors showering a freshman or sophomore student operating a real business out of their dorm (think Michael Dell physically assembling and shipping PCs from his UT dorm...) with millions of dollars. At Stanford, outside investors are so CONFIDENT one of these nerds is going to found the next unicorn firm to IPO at one billion dollars, they now offer "pre-idea" contracts to freshman students within WEEKS of starting school. Investors are attempting to lock up "talent" before that "talent" has even completed a single class project or taken a mid-term exam.
What Is the Actual College Experience in 2026?
For some readers of Baker's book, the biggest shock won't be the scientific fraud on the part of a man who served as university president. It won't be the insular, discriminatory secret club culture that creates a divided class polarized between people who are already rich and plan to become far richer by any means available versus those with a more humanitarian approach to their career and academic training. No, the biggest shock will be the contrast between the stereotype of a typical student's daily workload and attitudes towards that work at an elite college and the reality.
In the portion of narrative not explicitly tied to the MTL case and the macro observations of investor meddling in student life, Baker describes blowing off multiple large homework assignments in a core class for his would-be major and waiting until one or two days before due date to begin work. He describes deferring school work out of an entire WEEK to participate in an extracurricular "club" conducting a hackathon for high school students. Reading about his involvement in TreeHacks just seemed odd. What would a typical first year CS student have learned approximately seventy percent through their first year of CS coursework that would be worthy as a foundation to teach high school students?
Forty years ago, yer humble obedient scrivner WTH attended engineering school at what was thought to be at the time a "top twenty five" school (per US News & World Report). Admissions were assumed at the time to come from the top 10% of students nationwide. After the first year of mind-numbing core classes in calculus, differential equations and physics, I found myself falling from the top 1% of a high school class of about 400 to the fiftieth percentile of a class of about 250 EE, CS, MS, SSM and CE engineers. One of my closest undergrad classmates was arguably the smartest kid in the entire class. While double majoring in electrical engineering and biology to prep for medical school, he didn't just get "As", he didn't earn a single A minus in four years. He was simply brilliant at all of the advanced mathematics that really constitutes the core curriculum for most engineering majors. But being preternaturally comfortable with all of those mathematical manipulations and transformations was not the same as being able to complete the work in twenty or thirty minutes. A single problem on a homework assignment might still require four or five PAGES of hand-written integrations, etc. And my 4.0 friend was right there with the rest of us less gifted mathematicians working until 1am on due date to complete assignments.
Maybe it's possible that (relative) rubes like me who DIDN'T get into Stanford cannot comprehend the mind-numbing brilliance of the students who ARE admitted to Stanford. Maybe they ARE so gifted that they can comfortably blow off problem sets until 11pm the night before due date and knock them out in fifty minutes without breaking a sweat. Maybe they've been writing native C-language software drivers for an ASIC based control circuit they designed when they were fourteen years old in junior high and aren't challenged by a homework project in an intro computer science course illustrating the fundamental concepts of a finite state machine...
...or...
...Maybe it is possible that the cultivated sense of entitlement is so strong at Stanford and other "elite" colleges that expectations of students to finish coursework have slumped. Maybe grading curves have softened realities so much that a student can skip a couple of homework projects and still pull out a B minus grade and still look like they earned a B minus in an incredibly difficult curriculum and still merit respect and consideration by future employers...
...Or maybe it is possible that professors have grown so complacent with teaching and alternative web content covering the same material is so much better that students DON'T really have to attend classes, can learn on their own from the web and still complete the coursework and pass the tests.
Regardless of which of these scenarios might reflect some degree of truth, none of the them reflect well on the true value being provided by such institutions. EXCEPT for the "connections" made possible by simply being an alumni.
Speculation + Complacency = Catastrophe
Baker's observations may have been shocking to him as a new freshman at Stanford in their kind, but for anyone else watching Corporate America and elite universities evolve over the last twenty years or so, Baker's observations are only shocking in degree. No one should be surprised that a "scientist" and "professor" who routinely alternates between academic roles and business ventures would struggle with a decision to retract his own scientific publication if it meant tanking his own stock holdings by fifty percent (even if still leaving him with tens of millions of dollars). No one should be surprised that venture capitalists have blown off doing their own homework when picking new business ideas and instead are simply trying to corner the market by locking up talent before their college email address is even set up. And no one should be surprised that students who were raised amid a get-rich-quick culture and pressured from the crib to get into the best prep schools to grease the skids for getting into an elite school would arrive at that school fixated primarily on converting that opportunity into money.
The dangers posed by the present bubble in Artificial Intelligence aren't even an open secret. Thousands of reports and opinion pieces have been written describing the circular revenue being touted by participants. Stories are already being filed about nearly $500 million construction bills dating back to 2024 going unpaid by SpaceXAI that reflect cash crunches are already taking root. As of August 2026, a top trending story involves a 24 year-old named Leopold Aschenbrenner who built a position worth $48 billion dollars which collapsed to ZERO in THREE DAYS.
Aschenbrenner worked briefly at FTX after graduating from Columbia University in 2021, resigned the day FTX collapsed in November of 2022, took up a job at OpenAI in 2023 and was eventually fired in 2024 after communicating directly to its board about security concerns regarding the firm's intellectual property. He then wrote a blog post identifying investments in AI infrastructure firms as the highest return, lowest risk approach for profiting from the bubble, regardless of whether AI itself eventually paid off as a technology. This was actually a very SOUND investment strategy but the 24-year old, with ZERO prior experience in Finance and ZERO experience operating a hedge fund, actually created a hedge fund around this premise. His blog post was shared millions of times and attracted attention from actual hedge fund investors who saw him as a typical serial genius (but go back and look at that employment record...) and showered him with tens of millions of dollars which he promptly levered into vastly larger and more complicated positions he didn't understand. The dollar size of his bets failed to account for the lack of liquidity involved with such high leverage. It's one thing to devise a hedge strategy with only one or two million dollars in a position. It's another thing entirely to have a few BILLION tied up in something that might trigger a margin call requiring BILLIONS to be sold when the market isn't interested. It only took a couple of days of alignment to trigger margin calls big enough to evaporate a $48 billion dollar portfolio. Ironically, the name of his hedge fund? Situation Awareness.
Situational awareness, indeed. It seems like a long-forgotten concept. It certainly seems forgotten at many elite universities who are not only failing to teach skills required to recognize these ethical and economic dangers but are indoctrinating students into the corrupt practices and attitudes producing them.
WTH
