Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University operates as a coming of age story, an investigative thriller, and a sharp examination of wealth and influence. Baker arrived at Stanford fascinated by technology, only to discover through student journalism that his family’s profession might be calling him.

The son of two prominent Washington journalists, Baker joined the campus newspaper and began investigating scientific research published under Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s name. Still a teenager, Baker uncovered evidence that the research contained faked and manipulated information.

That reporting gives the book its propulsive core, but its broader subject is the concentration of power in American life. Stanford becomes a revealing window into an economy dominated by immense fortunes, technology firms, venture capital, private equity, crypto, and ambitious insiders eager to join their ranks.

Baker entered Stanford as an admirer who had dreamed of attending since childhood. He soon encountered what the book presents as moral decay beneath the polished surface, including an institutional culture where students could be treated as “a commodity.”

Stanford is the third wealthiest institution of higher education in the United States and sits in Palo Alto, amid Silicon Valley’s financial elite. Baker describes how the university’s pursuit of influence, donations, and power helped create what he calls “Stanford inside Stanford,” an exclusive network operating within the university.

In that network, professors, alumni, and technology professionals search for promising student ventures and can pour millions into them. One professor is estimated to be worth $20 billion after investing in student startups, including Google, making parts of the university resemble a venture capital operation more than a conventional academic institution.

Access to this world is selective. One of Baker’s friends says a student must be “plucked,” while venture capitalists largely ignore fields such as philosophy, whose Stanford department has more professors than graduating seniors majoring in the subject.

Chosen students can meet multimillionaires and billionaires, including at Stanford’s Coupa Café, which some use as an unofficial meeting space. Among them is “Justin,” who teaches the unofficial class that supplied the book’s title, “How to Rule the World.”

The class appears in no course catalog and promises lessons in success and global domination. Insider students also form groups such as No Filter, a little known, invitation only gathering where technology CEOs speak weekly to a select audience.

The advice offered in these circles is revealingly grotesque. Justin describes success as “extracting value from people,” an anonymous CEO declares that “peanut butter allergies are woke,” and one venture capitalist tells Baker, “I only date Latina women.”

Stanford officials appear more interested in policing ordinary campus partying than confronting powerful insiders. Meanwhile, professor and venture capitalist figures accused of inappropriate conduct retain access, while the Stanford tree mascot was suspended after being photographed waving a “Stanford Hates Fun” banner.

Baker’s investigation begins after a recent graduate directs him to a website where scientists question Tessier-Lavigne’s research. Baker cultivates secret sources, faces serious legal threats, and risks damage to his academic and personal life while pursuing the story, which eventually contributes to Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation.

The book’s weakness is its limited effort to place Stanford within America’s wider systems of inequality and corruption. The review points to Harvard University and Bard College accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein, widespread academic research problems, and pharmaceutical lobbying that reached $457 million last year and $131 million in this year’s first quarter.

Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation hardly removes him from elite circles. He soon launches another biotechnology startup and raises $1 billion, while one of his own backers later asks Baker whether he wants to create a startup and offers financial assistance.

Baker responds, “I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been,” before delivering the book’s coldest lesson: “That’s how this place works.” His reporting exposes Stanford’s machinery, even if the book stops short of fully exploring how thoroughly the same machinery shapes the rest of the United States.