How to Rule the World: The secret elite one freshman discovered at Stanford

By Anand Giridharadas

 

HOW TO RULE THE WORLD: An Education in Power at Stanford University

by Theo Baker

Published by Penguin Press

320 pages $32

 

If America is the most powerful country on earth, and Silicon Valley the most powerful place in that country, and Stanford the most powerful institution in that place, and a secretive network of students and adult hangers-on there the hub of influence on campus (I know that’s a lot of ifs, but let me finish), then here lies the rapacious, awkward centre of the world. 

Theo Baker, a reluctant journalist still not old enough to rent a car, nonetheless drives us, Jules Verne-like, into the molten core of our troubled time. He arrives at Stanford in 2022 as a bright-eyed freshman wanting to climb the Silicon Valley ladder, drunk on Big Tech propaganda about “changing the world.” He finishes that year having upended Stanford’s leadership, jaded by a Silicon Valley where faux idealism obscures corruption, greed and power lust — leavened only by the social obtuseness of these aspiring masters of the universe. 

 

Baker’s first book, How to Rule the World,  is a rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that “sets the agenda for the planet.” In every age, there is some place that epitomises how power works. Baker’s Stanford is a strong candidate, and his book follows in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle Liar’s Poker, but with more pimples and less eye contact. 

What gives Baker’s book its power is that he Forrest Gumps his way into answering a question about the attitudes and pretensions overlording mankind. In coming of age as a young man, he travels to the heart of a dehumanising age.The best nonfiction doesn’t declaim from oxygen-deprived heights; it ports you into a world and lets the relevance emerge. 

Stanford through Baker’s eyes is a foreign country with its own customs, religion, mores and language. Some students are “high-agency” super-builders or super-thinkers — techie Übermenschen expected to make billions. There is the “Coupa circuit,” where shady, tech-adjacent adults spend their days at a coffee shop with students, hoping to get in early on start-ups. There are the NGMIs, who are not going to make it. And there are the “plucked,” highly bright students who form a Stanford within Stanford, with access to Big Tech slush funds and parties. (The liberal arts majors and others with no prospects in technology are largely irrelevant.) 

The Stanford-within-Stanford Baker exposes matters to you even if this exclusive core feels impossibly distant. The university has let technology firms and venture capitalists worm so deeply into it that it now functions, in Baker’s telling, as a talent-scouting system for future unicorns. Everyone else is window dressing. 

Silicon Valley has long promoted itself as more meritocratic than elite circles past. Baker perforates this story. Many students are smart.  

But those who rise fastest often seem the most ruthless and maniacal. 

“Teenagers like me were a commodity,” Baker observes. “We were to be protected and preserved, cosseted and buttered up, exploited, manipulated, funded, bribed and cultivated. We were business.” 

At first charmed by Big Tech, he joins TreeHacks, a hackathon group where start-ups are born. He arrives as a believer, knocking on the door of unimaginable power, at times even appearing pluckable. 

But he also drifts to the school newspaper. Because his mother and father are prominent journalists (Susan Glasser of The New Yorker and Peter Baker of The New York Times), he arrives wanting nothing to do with the profession, which he associates with over-busy parents. Yet he joins The Stanford Daily, chases a story, gains traction and, after a tip, finds himself investigating the university president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne. 

Tessier-Lavigne’s case comes to encapsulate a university deeply entangled with industry. A renowned scientist who made a fortune in business, he is accused of having overseen falsified research. Scrutiny of his case is complicated by the fact that he serves at the pleasure of a board with commercial entanglements much like his own. 

Baker pursues the story like a campus reincarnation of Woodward and Bernstein. But for a time he continues trying to be an insider, even as he lobs grenades from without. He organises hackathons and files stories, takes coffees with talent brokers and stakes out Tessier-Lavigne. 

This dual-track approach would probably discredit an established journalist. For a college freshman who is still figuring himself out, it is understandable — and makes him harder to dismiss. Toward the end, after a dramatic 30-hour climax involving drugs, a near-death experience, legal threats, hastily written news stories, start-up ideas and an ex-girlfriend, Baker comes to clarity on who he is. 

Tessier-Lavigne resigns, owing significantly to Baker’s work. But he secures a large settlement, buying a vast mansion and raising $1 billion for a venture. Incredibly, but also fittingly, an investor in the deposed president’s new company reaches out to Baker, offering the deposer funding for any start-up he might aspire to build. 

“I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been,” Baker says. “That’s how this place works.”

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The reviewer is publisher of the newsletter The.Ink

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