Stanford’s star reporter takes on Silicon Valley’s ‘money-soaked’ startup culture

Theo Baker is truly an outlier.

While journalism as a major has seen shrinking enrollment for years and is even being dropped by some schools entirely, Baker, a senior at Stanford University, has doubled down on old-school investigative reporting, and it is paying off spectacularly.

Baker first made headlines as a college freshman when his reporting for The Stanford Daily led to the resignation of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. After uncovering allegations of research misconduct spanning two decades, Baker — just one month into college — found himself “receiving anonymous letters, conducting stakeouts, and tracking down confidential sources,” according to his publisher. Meanwhile, high-powered lawyers tried to discredit his work. By year’s end, Tessier-Lavigne had resigned, and Baker became the youngest-ever recipient of the George Polk Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious honors.

Shortly after, Warner Bros and famed producer Amy Pascal won a competitive auction for the film rights to his story.

But if that scandal put Baker on the map, his upcoming book may cement his reputation as the rare young journalist willing to challenge Silicon Valley’s startup machine.

“How to Rule the World,” out May 19 — three weeks before he graduates — promises an explosive look at how venture capitalists treat Stanford students as “a commodity,” wooing favored undergrads with slush funds, shell companies, yacht parties, and funding offers before they even have business ideas in their hunt for the next trillion-dollar founder.

“I watched in real time as my peers were taught to cut corners and plied with enormous wealth by people who wanted to exploit their talent,” Baker, who turns 21 next month, tells Axios. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with students, CEOs, VCs, Nobel laureates, and three Stanford presidents, the book aims to expose what Baker describes to Axios as a “weird, money-soaked subculture that has so much influence over the rest of the world.”

It’s perhaps an unsurprising move from someone who grew up around top journalists. His father is New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, and his mother is The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. While his peers chase venture capital funding and six-figure startup salaries, Baker spent his sophomore year reporting and took his junior year off to write, including two months at the Yaddo writers’ retreat.

That choice becomes even more striking against the backdrop of journalism’s current struggles. While traditional journalism programs fail to fill classes and media outfits face seemingly relentless layoffs, Baker represents something both exciting and increasingly uncommon: a star student betting his career on accountability journalism. Whether he’s a harbinger of renewed interest in investigative reporting remains to be seen, but we’d guess his book will capture the attention of plenty of college students — and it will almost certainly make waves in Silicon Valley while doing it.