Theo Baker

Theo Baker is a George Polk Award-winning investigative journalist whose reporting led to the resignation of Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. His fearless investigations into power, accountability, and the culture of Silicon Valley have appeared in The Atlantic, New York magazine, The New York Times, and other major publications, and have drawn praise from leading writers and journalists including Andrew Ross Sorkin, Kara Swisher, Jake Tapper, and Mark Leibovich.

A dynamic and thoughtful speaker, Baker brings audiences inside the worlds of investigative journalism, higher education, technology, media ethics, and institutional accountability. With humor and remarkable candor, he speaks not only about exposing power, but about the challenges of growing up, finding purpose, and learning how to stand apart from the systems you once hoped to join.

Baker arrived at Stanford as a seventeen-year-old freshman hoping to immerse himself in the world of coding and innovation. Instead, he found himself navigating two very different versions of campus life at once. On one side was the ordinary reality of being a college freshman: surviving grueling weeder classes, making friends, managing a long-distance relationship, coping with grief, and learning how to live on his own for the first time thousands of miles from home. On the other was the elite ecosystem hidden within Stanford and Silicon Valley—a world of billionaire investors, invitation-only dinners, and secretive social circles shaping the next generation of global power brokers.

Even while he embedded in the tech elite, Baker couldn’t escape his love of journalism and joined the Stanford Daily. There, what began as student reporting evolved into a groundbreaking investigation into allegations of scientific misconduct surrounding Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, one of the most celebrated neuroscientists in the world. Facing pressure from powerful lawyers, PR firms, and institutional forces determined to shut down scrutiny, Baker continued reporting not out of vindication or hostility toward Stanford, but because he believed that (student) journalism requires holding one’s own community accountable. In fact, Baker speaks openly about his enduring love for Stanford and his belief that institutions improve only when people inside them are willing to ask difficult questions.

The tension between admiration and accountability lies at the heart of his debut book and New York Times bestseller, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University. Part campus story, part investigative thriller, Baker reveals the hidden systems of access and privilege shaping Stanford while also chronicling his own coming-of-age experience as a freshman trying to understand where he fit inside a world obsessed with status and power.

The book is the product of extraordinary reporting and research. Baker conducted more than two hundred interviews with students, CEOs, venture capitalists, Nobel laureates, professors, administrators, athletes, scientific investigators, and university leaders, including three Stanford presidents and several trustees. He also drew on extensive documentation, including financial filings, legal papers, internal memos, text messages, contemporaneous notes, images, blog posts, and slide decks.

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