Four Years Investigating Stanford: Theo Baker’s Final Findings

Most members of Stanford’s Class of 2026 are bright, driven, and destined for success. Theo Baker already has a career. During his very first semester of college, he uncovered the scandal that forced Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign , work that earned him a George Polk Award, one of the most prestigious honors in journalism. Warner Brothers and producer Amy Pascal have already optioned the story’s rights. Now, with graduation less than a month away, Baker is releasing How to Rule the World, a sweeping narrative that chronicles his time at Stanford and the university’s often problematic entanglement with the venture capital industry. Early buzz suggests it could become a bestseller.

We’ve been watching this project closely (we touched on it a few weeks ago). We sat down with Baker last Friday. The conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for readability.

You arrived at Stanford as a coder. How did you end up breaking one of the biggest stories in the university’s history before finishing your freshman year?

I came in thinking tech and entrepreneurship were my future. I joined the student hackathon, Tree Hacks, helped run it, and even skipped ahead to the CS weeder class. But my grandfather , who I was very close to , had passed away a few weeks before I arrived. He talked about working on the student paper more than anyone I’ve ever known. So I joined the paper to feel connected to him. It was supposed to be a hobby, a way to meet people and explore campus.

Things escalated quickly. My first few stories got more attention than expected. Tips started pouring in, and one led me to a pseudonymous website called PubPeer, where scientists critique published research. There were comments, seven years old at the time, suggesting that papers co-authored by Stanford’s president had images that were duplicated, spliced, or otherwise irregular. I was just a month into my Stanford life when that investigation began. By the time I returned for sophomore year, the president had resigned.

Were people trying to warn you off the story?

Multiple times, even before I published my first article. People cautioned me that Tessier-Lavigne had a reputation for high integrity and sterling character , that I didn’t want to pursue this, that it would put me in an uncomfortable position within the institution. They weren’t wrong. Over the next 10 months, as the story grew, the pushback intensified. Within 24 hours of my first story, the board of trustees announced their own investigation. I quickly discovered that one of the board members overseeing it had an $18 million investment in Denali Therapeutics, the biotech company Tessier-Lavigne co-founded. And the announcement praising his “integrity and honor” came from an investigation supposedly looking into his scientific integrity. So the investigation itself became part of the story. Tessier-Lavigne never directly responded to my requests for comment during my freshman year. Eventually, he started sending messages to all faculty , including my professors , calling my reporting “breathtakingly outrageous and replete with falsehoods.” Then I started hearing more from his lawyers.

The book is really about something broader, though , what you call the Stanford inside Stanford. What does that mean?

Soon after arriving, I realized there was this parallel reality , an inside world , where kids identified early as potential billion-dollar founders get plucked from the crowd and placed into a world of access and resources. Yacht parties, slush funds, everyone texting the same billionaires for advice on weekends. As Stanford has become more famous as the birthplace of great startups, it’s become harder , according to some at the university , to spot genuine talent. So many people arrive thinking they can be the next billion-dollar dropout that there’s an entire system of hangers-on whose job is to separate the “wantrepreneurs” , people doing it because it looks good , from the so-called builders who actually have potential. It’s a system designed to sniff out the teenagers you can make money off of as early as possible.

The title of the book isn’t just a metaphor, is it?

No. It’s literally the name of a so-called secret class at Stanford, taught by a Silicon Valley CEO. It’s not really a class. It’s more like a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite. People don’t get course credit, but there are lectures, discussions, and guest speakers held once a week in the winter quarter on campus. When I arrived, it was a status symbol just to know it existed , that made you “rule-adjacent,” as one person told me. What this guy Justin was trying to do , as students in the class told me , was what everyone seems to be trying to do: get in and network with the teenagers who can be useful to you, young. Only he figured out how to cloak himself in mystique and make these talented, promising kids come to him, because he was promising them how to rule the world. He promised that the most brilliant students at Stanford would gather in this 12-person seminar, and that the only way to learn these secrets was through him. It’s a very poignant example of how this system of talent extraction manifests in strange ways.

What does that talent-scouting system actually look like on the ground?

There are VCs who employ older Stanford upperclassmen to identify freshmen as soon as they arrive on campus. It’s kept purposefully obscure. I’ve had people tell me it’s seen as an anti-signal to join one of the big entrepreneurship clubs , because that looks like you’re doing it for the title, as opposed to being in one of the secret feeder groups where the true builders supposedly congregate. But as much as there is genuine talent among the kids in this world, the primary qualification is who you know , whether you’re getting tapped on the shoulder. There was a CEO who cold-emailed me freshman year, asked to get to know me. The first time we went to dinner, we went to the Rosewood Hotel, and he’s sitting there spoon-feeding his eight-month-old caviar as he casually mentions that his first-ever contract was for Muammar Gaddafi. That casualness is fascinating to me. And this whole system goes a long way toward explaining how the big frauds develop. It starts by vesting huge amounts of authority, money, and power in the hands of teenagers without adequate safeguards for when things go wrong.

You arrived right as the FTX collapse was happening and ChatGPT launched. What was that like to observe up close?

The timing was almost absurd. We arrived at the tail end of the crypto craze , the assumption when we showed up was that crypto was how you were going to make your fortune. SBF begins his descent on November 2nd. ChatGPT comes out November 30th. And immediately everything pivots. I remember being at a dinner shortly after ChatGPT’s release, sitting with one of the biggest crypto boosters on campus, and he’s telling me that SBF was “directionally correct” , that was the phrase , but that everyone was trying to figure out how to get around the legality. Quickly, many of those same people realized that AI was the new craze they could jump on. They told me they could reach the same heights as SBF, preferably without the fall, by taking advantage of the newest new thing. Silicon Valley operates in cycles, but this one has been particularly fascinating to observe up close because the scale is just unfathomable.

Do you think your peers are leaning into entrepreneurship partly out of anxiety about the job market?

Absolutely. The AI rush has made talent the resource to mine in this modern-day gold rush , the most valuable researchers and founders are more valuable than ever, but entry-level positions are starting to disappear. There’s a common refrain among people in this world that it’s easier to raise money for a startup right now than to get an internship. Which is remarkable, right? Entrepreneurship, rather than being the non-conformist outsider thing it might once have been associated with, has become an expected path. That changes the nature of it entirely.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a 17-year-old heading to Stanford or any elite university today?

You have to be really conscious about whether you’re doing what you’re doing because you believe in it and because it’s the right thing , or because it’s the easy thing. It’s very easy to be buffeted by trends and the tech whirlpool, to find yourself wasting away at a job you don’t actually want because you followed the expected path. Following the expected path is way less interesting than going out and doing something for yourself. I admire the best founders who emerge from this place because they feel genuinely empowered to make a difference. You just have to be careful that you’re doing it for the right reasons , and not just because you want to get rich.

You came here thinking you’d be a founder. Do you still want to start something?

Honestly, I haven’t thought about it that much , it’s been a mad dash to finish the book and get to graduation, which is astonishingly only about a month away. But I think it comes across in the book that I really did fall in love with journalism. It’s a temperament, almost an affliction, more than a career. Whatever I do, it will intersect with that.