"Poignant, maddening, and genuinely hilarious, How to Rule the World is to be devoured--and fast, before Stanford buys up and sets fire to every copy. (Talk about a burn book!)" --Mark Leibovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town Winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford's president, Theo Baker offers a revelatory and gripping account of Silicon Valley hubris Slush funds. Shell companies. Yacht parties. This is life for Silicon Valley's favored teenagers. Seventeen-year-old Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior. Stanford, he realized, was less a school than a business. Its annual budget was nearly t
