Amorality and greed at Silicon Valley’s favourite university

Culture | Money and man at Stanford

Amorality and greed at Silicon Valley’s favourite university

A student journalist examines the culture at Stanford

The Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California.

Photograph: Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

Jul 2nd 2026|3 min read

THERE ARE good reasons to be sceptical of this book. The author, Theo Baker, is just 21 years old. His subject is his Stanford undergraduate years—a time that feels important while living through it, but is rarely of much interest to anyone else.

Yet “How to Rule the World” is worth reading. It follows in the tradition of “One L”, Scott Turow’s account of his first year at Harvard Law School, and William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale”, a jeremiad against that university’s leftward drift. Mr Baker offers an inside look at a world-shaping institution. Stanford has “a strong claim…to be the greatest university in the world”, with an annual budget larger than that of 116 national governments. Behemoths including Google and Netflix were founded by its students and alumni.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Money and man at Stanford”