A World From the Inside

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University is many books in one. It is, first, a coming-of-age story about the author, Theo Baker, the child of two prominent Washington journalists. He comes to the hallowed, legacy-filled halls of Stanford University fascinated by technology, but discovers, while working on the student newspaper, that the family business might well be calling him.

The book is also a hell of a page-turner, a real journalist’s “how I got that story” tale. In this case, the still-teenage Baker reveals through dogged investigative work at said campus newspaper that scientific research co-published by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the then-president of Stanford, contained faked and manipulated information.

But finally and most important, the reason you are reading this book is because of its deep dive into power and money in American life, something that is impossible to ignore in an age where Elon Musk is a (temporary) trillionaire, AI firms are hoping that the nearly $1 billion per day they are dumping into computing infrastructure won’t totally collapse the economy and/or humanity, and the main storehouse of wealth reserved for the ordinary working stiff—their 401(k) retirement plans—will almost certainly be handed over to private equity and crypto firms. We need more dispatches from inside this bubble, but few are willing to pierce it and give us a glimpse.

More from Helaine Olen

Baker comes to Stanford as an acolyte who has dreamed of attending the school since childhood. But he almost immediately discovers the moral rot beneath the surface, at a place where students are viewed as “a commodity.” That’s the strength of How to Rule the World. The weakness is the converse. Baker is so intent on exposing Stanford and Silicon Valley for their corruption, greed, and cynicism that you can easily gloss past his less-than-robust attempt to situate them within the broader context of the systemic detritus of the 21st-century American establishment.

You don’t need me to tell you that Stanford University is not just any random college. Located in Palo Alto, in the heart of where Silicon Valley’s financial elite live and play, it is the third-wealthiest institution of higher education in the United States. But this didn’t just happen by lucky accident of geography. Baker reveals in delightful detail how Stanford—in a drive for power, influence, and donations—has allowed an elite parallel campus to develop over the past two decades. At this “Stanford inside Stanford,” as Baker calls it, professors, alums, and Silicon Valley professionals alike are on the prowl, able to toss millions at even vaguely promising student entrepreneurial efforts. In effect, we’re talking about not so much an institution of higher learning as we are a venture capital firm.

The motivation is obvious. One professor is worth an estimated $20 billion from investing in student startups, including one by the name of Google.

This world is not open to everyone. One needs to be, as one of Baker’s friends puts it, “plucked.” (Venture capitalists, as a rule, are not looking to meet with promising philosophy majors, with the result that the philosophy department has more professors than graduating seniors majoring in the subject.) For those deemed worthy, opportunities abound to meet with multimillionaires and billionaires, several of whom use the Stanford Coupa Café location as an unofficial on-campus meeting room. That includes “Justin,” who runs the class the book takes its title from.

“How to Rule the World” is listed in no course catalog. Students take it to learn pretty much what the title says: the secrets of success and global domination, at least according to Justin. Insider students, in turn, start insider groups, like the little-known, invite-only No Filter, where tech CEOs were invited to speak to a chosen few on a weekly basis. Private dinners and meetings with multimillionaires and billionaires seeking the newest new thing seemingly abound for the anointed students. Throughout these interactions, self-important wealthy gasbags share opinions ranging from how success comes from “extracting value from people” (Justin) to “peanut butter allergies are woke” (an anonymous CEO). One VC informs Baker, “I only date Latina women.”

Amusingly, Baker’s reporting attracts the attention of a number of wealthy types, one of whom recruits him to, yes, another secret society, this one made up of people prominent in business and academia.

Stanford seemingly pays all this no mind. Instead, factotums relentlessly police harmless pursuits like student on-campus partying, seeking to create, in the words of one fraternity member, an “‘inclusive’ environment.” (Cue the laugh track.) The hypocrisy reeks. Professor/venture capitalist hybrids like Justin, accused of hitting on female students, are allowed unimpeded access, while the school mascot—a tree, mind you—photographed waving a “Stanford Hates Fun” banner, gets suspended for their troubles.

All this grossness, as Baker eventually discovers, starts at the top, probably something that shouldn’t come as a surprise given Stanford was the university of a rogues’ gallery of bad operators in recent years. Elizabeth Holmes came in with the freshman class in 2002, filed her first patent application the next year, and by 2004 dropped out, using the tuition money she saved to start a health care concern called Theranos. The team behind Juul, the electronic cigarette that was aggressively—and illegally—marketed to teenagers, devised their product as part of a Stanford graduate student thesis for a program in “product design.”

Marc Tessier-Lavigne isn’t just the president of Stanford and a scientist; he’s a powerful business and institutional grandee, worth hundreds of millions of dollars courtesy of his work in the biotechnology sector. He’s also a villain out of central casting: suave, well-mannered in public, but the sort of guy who needs to tell you he loves “interacting … with people,” because he can’t actually demonstrate it. He is known to fly into fits of “immense rage” and to be “fucking vindictive” to those who stand in his way.

A recent graduate tips Baker off to a website where fellow scientists are questioning the validity of Tessier-Lavigne’s research. This sets off the cat-and-mouse dynamic that drives the book, giving it a can’t-put-down feel. Baker—again, still a teenager!—develops secret sources, withstands fairly scary legal threats, and, at times, almost torpedoes both his personal and academic life (something at which all too many journalists will likely wince in recognition while reading) as he seeks to get at the truth. Eventually, MTL, as he is sometimes known on campus, is unable to weather the scandal Baker uncovers and resigns.

The achievement is immense. But here is where the book could stand to dig deeper. Stanford, as prominent and wealthy as it is, is not dictating the tenor of American life. It is merely a cog, albeit an extremely important and pioneering one, in the great American inequality and corruption machines. Baker says it’s “because I love Stanford that I wish it to be better.” But he fails to apply the same attitude to the rest of America.

Stanford is hardly alone in its corruption. Consider: Both Harvard University and liberal arts champion Bard College fell over themselves to feed at Jeffrey Epstein’s financial trough. Academic fraud and exaggeration are all but commonplace, and they span the disciplines. Half of psychology studies fail to replicate. Any number of prominent researchers have been accused of looking the other way as falsified research is published under their name, including best-selling author Dan Ariely. Heck, Tessier-Levigne isn’t even the only scientist who put his name to troubled Alzheimer’s disease research.

The same is true for Genentech, the pharmaceutical giant that backed some of MTL’s dodgy research. Yes, as Baker notes, they tossed money at Congress, hoping to keep less-than-effective medications on the market. Something else he could have pointed out: They are hardly the first pharmaceutical company to do so. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry is the largest source of lobbyist money in Washington, D.C., with $457 million spent last year and another $131 million just in the first quarter of this year.

It’s not just Silicon Valley investors watching The Social Network for inspiration, failing to see it as the cautionary tale it is, corrupting American life. Decades ago, would-be finance bros similarly took the film Wall Street and Michael Lewis’s seminal book Liar’s Poker not as the morality tales they were intended to be, but as how-to manuals. Lewis has said repeatedly in interviews that numerous people wrote him letters to tell him that his book inspired them to go into finance. Between crypto, Robinhood, gambling apps, and prediction markets, we have become a nation of schemers and scammers, looking to climb over one another to get to the top of the moneymaking tree. There is, in other words, something rotten festering at the core of American life. The greed of Silicon Valley is just a symptom of it.

But here is one thing Baker comes to understand all too well: Once you are in, you are in. Tessier-Lavigne hardly skulks off in disgrace. He promptly debuts a new biotechnology startup, his damaged reputation no impediment to raising $1 billion to fund it. Last year, a Bloomberg reporter wrote a funny story about how the most in-demand hedge fund traders are the ones who just lost a ton of money: That means you take risks, you live on the edge, and you are just aggressive enough to turn it around. The idea of accountability is simply a foreign concept in our society.

Even Baker, with his scoop that attempts to impose some measure of accountability, to expose the charlatans, is hardly an outcast. One of Tessier-Lavigne’s own backers reaches out to him, asking whether he’s considering starting a startup himself and offering financial help if the answer is yes. “I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been,” Baker concludes. “That’s how this place works.”

Here’s hoping that in his next book, the preternaturally talented Baker will write more about how this is as true for the United States as he discovered it to be for Silicon Valley and Stanford University.

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.