Anand Giridharadas, The Secret Elite One Freshman Discovered at Stanford, NYTimes, May 18, 2026.
Book Review: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, by Theo Baker.
Theo Baker arrived at Stanford in 2022 and pursued two somewhat different paths, junior tech bro, and student journalist. His freshman year included:
(1) Losing your grandparent. (2) Losing your girlfriend. (3) Losing your virginity. (4) Bringing down a university president. (5) Overdosing. (6) Winning a George Polk Award. (7) Partying on yachts and socializing with billionaires. (8) Fending off legal threats. (9) Becoming a meme. (10) Neglecting to complete your homework.
Giridharadas observes:
There are two questions people ask as much as any other: “How can I belong?” and “Who runs the world?” They differ in tenor and aim. The former is vulnerable, often unspoken; the latter fuels two-thirds of Reddit.
What gives Baker’s book its power is that, in this setting, these inquiries strangely dovetailed. By trying to answer what it takes to fit in — the freshman question — he Forrest Gumps his way into answering a question about the attitudes and pretensions overlording mankind. In coming of age as a young man, he travels to the heart of a dehumanizing age.
And so:
Stanford through Baker’s eyes is a foreign country with its own customs, religion, mores and language. Some students are “high-agency” super-builders or super-thinkers — techie Übermenschen expected to make billions. There is the “Coupa circuit,” where shady, tech-adjacent adults spend their days at a coffee shop with students, hoping to get in early on start-ups. There are the NGMIs, who are not going to make it. And there are the “plucked,” highly bright students who form a Stanford within Stanford, with access to Big Tech slush funds and parties. (The liberal arts majors and others with no prospects in technology are largely irrelevant.) [...]
The Stanford-within-Stanford Baker exposes matters to you even if this exclusive core feels impossibly distant. The university has let technology firms and venture capitalists worm so deeply into it that it now functions, in Baker’s telling, as a talent-scouting system for future unicorns. Everyone else is window dressing. And this campus elite betrays attitudes — captured by Baker — so contemptuous of non-Übermenschen, not to mention those far outside this world, that one gets a feel for the kinds of mentalities designing A.I. and presuming to rewire our societies.
Silicon Valley has long promoted itself as more meritocratic than elite circles past. Baker perforates this story. As always, connections, access, shadowy brokers and whims decide who gets the keys. Many students are smart. But those who rise fastest often seem the most ruthless and maniacal. [...]
“Teenagers like me were a commodity,” Baker observes. “We were to be protected and preserved, cosseted and buttered up, exploited, manipulated, funded, bribed and cultivated. We were business.”
There's much more to the review, mostly the story of how Baker joins the school newspaper and pursues an investigation that helps topple Stanford's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
