{"id":18,"date":"2026-05-22T18:33:46","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T18:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=18"},"modified":"2026-05-22T18:33:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T18:33:46","slug":"fear-and-loathing-in-palo-alto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

For decades, \u201cWall Street\u201d was America\u2019s all-purpose byword for capitalist villainy. \u201cBig tech\u201d 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\u2019s DOGE initiative owes much to the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

Read more The Workers Who Defy Gravity<\/a><\/p>\n

Theo Baker, an investigative journalist wunderkind and soon-to-be Stanford graduate, is not the first to trace Silicon Valley\u2019s 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\u2019s recent history and culture. Baker\u2019s much-anticipated debut book, How to Rule the World<\/em>, is three things at once: an account of his George Polk Award-winning investigation into former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne\u2019s research misconduct, an ethnographic study of the campus\u2019s social \u201cunderbelly,\u201d and a personal memoir. It largely succeeds at all three purposes. But Baker\u2019s disdain for his subjects is, too often, an obstacle to understanding them.<\/p>\n

The book follows Baker\u2019s freshman year, from his first steps in student journalism to the investigation that brought down Stanford\u2019s president. Along the way, Baker experiences some typical things\u2014the loss of his grandfather, his girlfriend, and his virginity\u2014but also some highly atypical things, like rubbing shoulders with billionaires at lavish parties. Baker\u2019s chapters on his investigation of Tessier-Lavigne are his strongest. His central allegation is that Tessier-Lavigne\u2019s then-celebrated 2009 Nature<\/em> paper on Alzheimer\u2019s disease, produced while the Canadian neuroscientist led research at the biotech firm Genentech, was based on fabricated data, and that the firm\u2019s 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\u2019t bite.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Volkswagen passes the Stanford Daily<\/em>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The argumentative spine of How to Rule the World<\/em>, though, is Baker\u2019s case against Stanford. Its culture, he argues, inculcates fraud. Venture capitalists throw ungodly sums of money at undergraduate \u201cbuilders\u201d 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\u2019s freshman year, extended all the way to Stanford\u2019s presidency. Baker writes in the prologue that \u201cpower protects itself, secrets remain hidden in plain sight, and robust guardrails are lacking,\u201d and this was true both of \u201cthe president, whose research had escaped scrutiny for years,\u201d and in \u201cthe underbelly of the student body.\u201d Tessier-Lavigne and his students, he argues, both participated in the university\u2019s fake-it-till-you-make-it culture.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s misconduct while the university directed increasingly sharp (and ultimately baseless) legal threats his way. After its president\u2019s 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\u2019s account, misconduct in students\u2019 economic and academic lives\u2014cheating and plagiarism are rampant, he reports\u2014flows from a culture of impunity that has long pervaded the university\u2019s upper ranks.<\/p>\n

All this is why the university produces an unusual concentration of high-profile bad actors: Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried (who didn\u2019t attend Stanford, though both his parents are professors), cryptocurrency fraudster Do Kwon, and Juul co-founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees, among many others. It\u2019s a persuasive argument, and How To Rule the World<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Take Baker\u2019s treatment of venture-capital recruiting dinners. Students are \u201chunted\u201d by adults seeking \u201ca meal ticket,\u201d he writes\u2014adults who \u201cfetishize youth.\u201d He calls the venture capitalists behind these events \u201cHangers-On,\u201d proper-noun, who \u201cpluck\u201d 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\u2019ve attended such dinners; they weren\u2019t for me, as my Washington Monthly<\/em> editorial internship will attest.) At Stanford, as on the East Coast, the students who attend are hardly prey. But Baker\u2019s vocabulary\u2014\u201cplucked,\u201d \u201chunt,\u201d \u201cfetishize\u201d\u2014implies a coercion these relationships don\u2019t necessarily have.<\/p>\n

Any adult who takes young founders seriously, it seems, is suspect in Baker\u2019s 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 \u201cpatient farm animals waiting to feed at the trough.\u201d We obviously know nothing about these students\u2019 particular characters; the mere fact that they\u2019re 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 \u201cethics and stuff like this.\u201d \u201cI put mine up and looked around,\u201d Baker writes: \u201cNot a single other arm was in the air.\u201d But there are many conceivable explanations besides Baker\u2019s singular moral character: students may have been shy, or\u2014more likely\u2014not paying attention. Anyone who has sat in a college discussion section will find the latter plausible.<\/p>\n

Baker handles Tessier-Lavigne\u2019s story with nuance, empathy, and professionalism. In one scene, at The Stanford Daily<\/em>\u2019s end-of-year banquet, the DJ plays a parody song targeting Tessier-Lavigne\u2014\u201cI\u2019m Marc Tessier-Lavigne, mothafuckaaaaaah \/ I\u2019ve got so much money mothafuckaaaaah<\/em>\u201d\u2014and Baker is mortified at the treatment of his subject as a punchline. But his other subjects are often not so lucky: Baker\u2019s treatment of his classmates sometimes reads like stand-up routines at their expense.<\/p>\n

Read more Be Thankful Barney Frank Wasn\u2019t Pushed Out in 1989<\/a><\/p>\n

The entire arc of a fellow student in Baker\u2019s philosophy seminar, whom he dubs Julian, is engineered as setup and payoff. He\u2019s \u201ca bit of a menace\u201d in class, Baker writes, given to boasting: \u201cNot to flex,\u201d Julian says, \u201cbut I have been the biggest value add to this class.\u201d He relentlessly defends the billionaire class, viewing them as the real \u201cdowntrodden\u201d in American life. And Baker walks him, page by page, toward a single zinger: \u201cJulian, the billionaire-wannabe who considered a wealth tax \u2018the single most dangerous proposal in politics,\u2019 looked me square in the eyes and said, \u2018In many ways, I\u2019m a Buddhist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a forgivable offense: the kid does sound like a piece of work. But all this undercuts How to Rule the World<\/em>\u2019s thesis. Baker argues that Stanford corrupts those who enter: \u201cgeniuses are stockpiled, ready to reinvent the world but taught instead how to prioritize their self-interest.\u201d But Julian\u2019s character flaws are profound, and, as a \u201cmenace,\u201d clearly exceptional even by Stanford\u2019s standards. Stanford can\u2019t be doing all the work here. What gives?<\/p>\n

Baker has a good sense of humor. But his impulse to play those around him for comedic effect weakens his analysis of Silicon Valley\u2019s politics, too: his subjects become strawmen. An unnamed \u201cfamous VC partner\u201d briefly opines on politics, telling Baker that \u201cStanford\u2019s biggest problem is that it admits too few white men.\u201d When later asked what drives him, he answers, \u201cMoney. Money is a rush.\u201d A founder of a wildly successful startup, whom Baker dubs Derek, is the book\u2019s most attentive observer of the political scene. He tells Baker he wants to \u201cbuild a political machine to take over San Francisco\u201d and views politics \u201cas a matter of \u2018solving an engineering problem.\u2019\u201d He calls higher education \u201cvery corrupt,\u201d \u201cclubby and flabby,\u201d and observes that current leaders do not \u201chave a very cogent view of what it means to have power.\u201d Then Baker claims to have caught him spoon-feeding \u201cblack pearls of Rosewood Private Batch Caviar\u201d to his nine-month-old, and the chapter concludes: \u201cThis was the world I was giving up.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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\u2014the 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<\/em> offers on the substantive political commitments of those in the tech world.<\/p>\n

Intellectual currents no less influential than Effective Altruism go unmentioned. In How to Rule the World<\/em>, there is no reference to rationalism, longtermism, techno-accelerationism, the political thought of Stanford scholar Ren\u00e9 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<\/em>, but as writers like John Ganz and Quinn Slobodian have shown, they are complicated. Baker\u2019s takedowns are entertaining, but they make for better polemics than guides to the Valley\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you can inculcate innovation without enabling fraud,\u201d Baker writes in the book\u2019s closing pages. I hope he\u2019s right. But Baker\u2019s intense and categorical skepticism of the undergraduate-founder suggests he isn\u2019t so certain himself. Baker might have built upon Malcolm Harris\u2019s magisterial history of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto<\/em> (2023). As Harris observes, Leland Stanford\u2014the university\u2019s founder\u2014pioneered a horse-breeding technique called the \u201cPalo Alto Method,\u201d 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. \u201cStanford switched from colts to young people,\u201d Harris writes, \u201cbut it was still a breeding and training project.\u201d<\/p>\n

The purpose of showering students with money and setting them loose is, on this account, precisely to make them fail faster. (You can\u2019t test a person\u2019s ability to manage money and people if they don\u2019t have money and can\u2019t hire people.) What Baker reads as a malign strand within Stanford\u2019s culture may, in fact, be true to its founding spirit. And if Stanford can be different\u2014hardly a foregone conclusion\u2014he doesn\u2019t tell us how.<\/p>\n

Still, none of this should obscure what Baker has accomplished. How to Rule the World<\/em> is an adversarial account of a culture that, as Baker observes, could very well have subsumed him\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Inside Colbert\u2019s Success<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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