Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto

For decades, “Wall Street” was America’s all-purpose byword for capitalist villainy. “Big tech” is now running it close, and for good reason. Silicon Valley has, in recent years, produced high-profile bad actors at a remarkable pace. And after at least two decades of semi-stable alignment with the Democratic Party, influential figures in tech lurched right post-pandemic, burrowing into anti-democratic and extremist political thought. Some of this has since burst into Washington: Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative owes much to the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley.

Theo Baker, an investigative journalist wunderkind and soon-to-be Stanford graduate, is not the first to trace Silicon Valley’s rot to his university. (The authors Malcolm Harris, John Carreyrou, and Noam Cohen have each staked out similar territory.) But he is the first to document, with rigor and detail, the institution’s recent history and culture. Baker’s much-anticipated debut book, How to Rule the World, is three things at once: an account of his George Polk Award-winning investigation into former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s research misconduct, an ethnographic study of the campus’s social “underbelly,” and a personal memoir. It largely succeeds at all three purposes. But Baker’s disdain for his subjects is, too often, an obstacle to understanding them.

The book follows Baker’s freshman year, from his first steps in student journalism to the investigation that brought down Stanford’s president. Along the way, Baker experiences some typical things—the loss of his grandfather, his girlfriend, and his virginity—but also some highly atypical things, like rubbing shoulders with billionaires at lavish parties. Baker’s chapters on his investigation of Tessier-Lavigne are his strongest. His central allegation is that Tessier-Lavigne’s then-celebrated 2009 Nature paper on Alzheimer’s disease, produced while the Canadian neuroscientist led research at the biotech firm Genentech, was based on fabricated data, and that the firm’s internal review confirmed as much but never made the findings public. Four senior Genentech executives, all under NDA, independently corroborate this account to Baker. To test them, he periodically asks leading questions he knows to be false: they don’t bite.

Baker uses burner phones, keeps sources off his contacts list, and routes communications through online aliases and virtual machines. After briefing his editor on a whiteboard, he hides his list of sources inside a dry-erase marker hidden in a desk drawer. Then, when Tessier-Lavigne’s Volkswagen passes the Stanford Daily’s building one afternoon, Baker sprints down the middle of a campus road in dress shoes and chases the car on foot while his editor pursues on a bike. It reads like a memoir crossed with a spy thriller, which may explain why Baker has already sold the film rights to the book.

The argumentative spine of How to Rule the World, though, is Baker’s case against Stanford. Its culture, he argues, inculcates fraud. Venture capitalists throw ungodly sums of money at undergraduate “builders” with little due diligence. Students, predictably, learn to misappropriate it, overclaim their abilities, and misrepresent themselves to their peers and to the public. Feeling pressure to appear accomplished and perfect, students engage in all manner of deception to keep up. And these issues, in Baker’s freshman year, extended all the way to Stanford’s presidency. Baker writes in the prologue that “power protects itself, secrets remain hidden in plain sight, and robust guardrails are lacking,” and this was true both of “the president, whose research had escaped scrutiny for years,” and in “the underbelly of the student body.” Tessier-Lavigne and his students, he argues, both participated in the university’s fake-it-till-you-make-it culture.

And Stanford, wanting always to appear unblemished, fails to discipline both students and faculty when they engage in bad behavior. Baker harrowingly recounts reporting on Tessier-Lavigne’s misconduct while the university directed increasingly sharp (and ultimately baseless) legal threats his way. After its president’s resignation, Baker observes, the university scrubbed its investigation report from its website. Stanford likewise took no disciplinary action against geneticist Stan Cohen following his conviction for misleading investors in his biotech startup. And it quietly retained a football coach with multiple internal misconduct findings. On Baker’s account, misconduct in students’ economic and academic lives—cheating and plagiarism are rampant, he reports—flows from a culture of impunity that has long pervaded the university’s upper ranks.

All this is why the university produces an unusual concentration of high-profile bad actors: Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, cryptocurrency fraudster Do Kwon, and Juul co-founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees, among many others. It’s a persuasive argument, and How To Rule the World makes it with considerable pathos and wit. But Baker is not above a little overclaiming of his own. He occasionally reaches for charged language to impugn practices that, on reflection, are not intrinsically sinister.

Take Baker’s treatment of venture-capital recruiting dinners. Students are “hunted” by adults seeking “a meal ticket,” he writes—adults who “fetishize youth.” He calls the venture capitalists behind these events “Hangers-On,” proper-noun, who “pluck” their targets. But recruiting dinners are hardly a Silicon Valley invention; Wall Street, consulting firms, and law firms have run similar events at elite colleges for at least two generations. (I’ve attended such dinners; they weren’t for me, as my Washington Monthly editorial internship will attest.) At Stanford, as on the East Coast, the students who attend are hardly prey. But Baker’s vocabulary—“plucked,” “hunt,” “fetishize”—implies a coercion these relationships don’t necessarily have.

Any adult who takes young founders seriously, it seems, is suspect in Baker’s eyes. So, at times, is technological innovation itself. His contempt for his startup-founder peers is obvious. In one telling passage, he likens students waiting to meet with Ivan, a twenty-one-year-old talent-spotter for venture capitalists, to “patient farm animals waiting to feed at the trough.” We obviously know nothing about these students’ particular characters; the mere fact that they’re attempting to make a professional connection renders them akin to livestock. Baker often casts himself as the only do-gooder in a sea of amoral strivers. In one scene, a teaching assistant asks members of a discussion section to raise their hands if they care about “ethics and stuff like this.” “I put mine up and looked around,” Baker writes: “Not a single other arm was in the air.” But there are many conceivable explanations besides Baker’s singular moral character: students may have been shy, or—more likely—not paying attention. Anyone who has sat in a college discussion section will find the latter plausible.

Baker handles Tessier-Lavigne’s story with nuance, empathy, and professionalism. In one scene, at The Stanford Daily’s end-of-year banquet, the DJ plays a parody song targeting Tessier-Lavigne—“I’m Marc Tessier-Lavigne, mothafuckaaaaaah / I’ve got so much money mothafuckaaaaah”—and Baker is mortified at the treatment of his subject as a punchline. But his other subjects are often not so lucky: Baker’s treatment of his classmates sometimes reads like stand-up routines at their expense.

The entire arc of a fellow student in Baker’s philosophy seminar, whom he dubs Julian, is engineered as setup and payoff. He’s “a bit of a menace” in class, Baker writes, given to boasting: “Not to flex,” Julian says, “but I have been the biggest value add to this class.” He relentlessly defends the billionaire class, viewing them as the real “downtrodden” in American life. And Baker walks him, page by page, toward a single zinger: “Julian, the billionaire-wannabe who considered a wealth tax ‘the single most dangerous proposal in politics,’ looked me square in the eyes and said, ‘In many ways, I’m a Buddhist.’”

It’s a forgivable offense: the kid does sound like a piece of work. But all this undercuts How to Rule the World’s thesis. Baker argues that Stanford corrupts those who enter: “geniuses are stockpiled, ready to reinvent the world but taught instead how to prioritize their self-interest.” But Julian’s character flaws are profound, and, as a “menace,” clearly exceptional even by Stanford’s standards. Stanford can’t be doing all the work here. What gives?

Baker has a good sense of humor. But his impulse to play those around him for comedic effect weakens his analysis of Silicon Valley’s politics, too: his subjects become strawmen. An unnamed “famous VC partner” briefly opines on politics, telling Baker that “Stanford’s biggest problem is that it admits too few white men.” When later asked what drives him, he answers, “Money. Money is a rush.” A founder of a wildly successful startup, whom Baker dubs Derek, is the book’s most attentive observer of the political scene. He tells Baker he wants to “build a political machine to take over San Francisco” and views politics “as a matter of ‘solving an engineering problem.’” He calls higher education “very corrupt,” “clubby and flabby,” and observes that current leaders do not “have a very cogent view of what it means to have power.” Then Baker claims to have caught him spoon-feeding “black pearls of Rosewood Private Batch Caviar” to his nine-month-old, and the chapter concludes: “This was the world I was giving up.”

I don’t know Derek or the unnamed VC, and for all I know, they really are Scrooge McDuck-like figures. But by declining to probe their politics or find subjects with more substantial ones, Baker neglects to map the Valley ideologically. He makes brief mention of Effective Altruism—the philosophy, held by Sam Bankman-Fried, that one has a moral obligation to accumulate vast wealth to later direct it toward good causes. But this is practically all How to Rule the World offers on the substantive political commitments of those in the tech world.

Intellectual currents no less influential than Effective Altruism go unmentioned. In How to Rule the World, there is no reference to rationalism, longtermism, techno-accelerationism, the political thought of Stanford scholar René Girard (a mentor to Peter Thiel, and an influence upon JD Vance), or the anti-democratic neoreaction of Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. These ideologies may not be correct, but as writers like John Ganz and Quinn Slobodian have shown, they are complicated. Baker’s takedowns are entertaining, but they make for better polemics than guides to the Valley’s politics.

“I think you can inculcate innovation without enabling fraud,” Baker writes in the book’s closing pages. I hope he’s right. But Baker’s intense and categorical skepticism of the undergraduate-founder suggests he isn’t so certain himself. Baker might have built upon Malcolm Harris’s magisterial history of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto (2023). As Harris observes, Leland Stanford—the university’s founder—pioneered a horse-breeding technique called the “Palo Alto Method,” in which young horses were made to run earlier than was safe. The physical risk to the animals was grave, but that was precisely the point: it culled the weak from the strong early. If a horse was going to fail, Stanford reasoned, it might as well fail fast. “Stanford switched from colts to young people,” Harris writes, “but it was still a breeding and training project.”

The purpose of showering students with money and setting them loose is, on this account, precisely to make them fail faster. (You can’t test a person’s ability to manage money and people if they don’t have money and can’t hire people.) What Baker reads as a malign strand within Stanford’s culture may, in fact, be true to its founding spirit. And if Stanford can be different—hardly a foregone conclusion—he doesn’t tell us how.

Still, none of this should obscure what Baker has accomplished. How to Rule the World is an adversarial account of a culture that, as Baker observes, could very well have subsumed him—and given how much money was on offer, his choice to pursue accountability journalism instead should count for something. Even today, he writes, venture capitalists occasionally offer to fund a Theo Baker startup, should he ever want one.