There are a hundred and fifty people – and they are all men – who run the world …Chamath Palihapitiya
There is an abiding paradox in the history of human civilization. The institutions established to enlarge the human mind have, on occasion, become instruments for concentrating power in the hands of those whose minds were intended to liberate. The university, conceived as a sanctuary of inquiry, a custodian of intellectual freedom and a forum in which received wisdom may be challenged, is not immune to this paradox. Indeed, when a university becomes closely intertwined with wealth, technological ambition and the political aspirations of an influential economic class, it may cease to be merely a place where young people learn to think. It may become a place where they learn how to command.
This is the disturbing proposition that emerges from Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University. Published in 2026, the book is simultaneously an account of a young journalist’s investigation into institutional misconduct and a critical examination of the relationship between elite education, Silicon Valley wealth and the cultivation of future rulers. Baker arrived at Stanford in 2022, aged seventeen, attracted by the promise of technological ingenuity and the prospect of participating in a world where youthful intelligence could transform society. What he encountered, however, was a university within the university: an exclusive ecosystem in which venture capitalists, technology entrepreneurs and influential benefactors sought to identify exceptional students, cultivate their ambitions and position them for future power.
The significance of Baker’s account lies not in any suggestion that Stanford is devoid of intellectual excellence, nor in the proposition that wealth and ambition are inherently objectionable. Stanford has contributed enormously to scientific discovery, technological advancement and economic development. Its graduates have helped create industries that have altered the conditions of modern existence. The question is more fundamental: what happens when the cultivation of intelligence becomes inseparable from the cultivation of influence, when innovation is measured predominantly by its capacity to generate wealth, and when the brightest young minds are encouraged to regard the acquisition of power as the natural culmination of their education?
The concern is that the university may unwittingly—or, in certain circumstances, institutionally—substitute the ambition to serve humanity with the ambition to organize humanity around oneself.
Baker’s narrative invites us to consider whether Stanford has become a particularly revealing expression of a wider transformation in higher education. The university is no longer merely an institution in which society invests in knowledge for the common good. It increasingly operates within an economic environment in which knowledge is an asset, students are prospective investments, research is a source of commercial advantage, and intellectual achievement is assessed according to its potential to produce extraordinary private returns.
The danger is not that talented students will succeed. It is that they may be taught to understand success too narrowly.
Baker’s most revealing observation concerns the existence of what he describes as a “Stanford inside Stanford”: a privileged world of access, money and opportunity available to a select group of students who attract the attention of technology investors and wealthy entrepreneurs. The book describes exclusive gatherings, unconventional funding arrangements, private networking opportunities and efforts to identify promising young people before they have even developed a commercial idea. The underlying proposition is that exceptional talent, properly identified and cultivated, may become the foundation of extraordinary economic power.
There is nothing intrinsically objectionable about recognizing talent early. Universities have always brought promising students into contact with scholars, patrons and institutions capable of helping them fulfil their potential. Scientific research requires investment, entrepreneurship requires capital, and the translation of intellectual discovery into practical application may benefit society immeasurably. The problem arises when the identification of talent becomes a mechanism for constructing an exclusive ruling class.
The distinction between mentorship and patronage is crucial. Mentorship seeks to enlarge a person’s intellectual and moral capacities. Patronage, particularly when accompanied by substantial financial incentives, may seek to direct those capacities towards the interests of the patron. The former encourages independence of thought; the latter may produce an obligation, subtle or explicit, to conform to the expectations of those who have provided access.
A student who receives an extraordinary opportunity from a venture capitalist may understandably feel privileged. Yet privilege has a psychological dimension that deserves examination. It can persuade the recipient that he or she has been selected not merely for possessing talent, but because of an exceptional capacity to transcend the limitations that govern ordinary people. The distinction is consequential. Talent is a capacity; exceptionalism is a belief about entitlement.
When young people are repeatedly told that they are destined to change the world, the statement may initially serve as encouragement. When reinforced by wealth, exclusivity and the attention of influential figures, however, it may evolve into a conviction that the ordinary constraints of law, ethics and social responsibility were designed for other people.
The problem is therefore not the existence of an elite. Every society requires people with exceptional abilities, and complex institutions must frequently entrust important responsibilities to those with specialized knowledge. The problem is an elite that begins to regard its exceptional abilities as a justification for exceptional immunity.
This is where Baker’s account assumes a significance beyond the campus. A student who learns to equate intelligence with entitlement may eventually become an entrepreneur, financier, political adviser or technological innovator whose decisions affect millions. If that individual has acquired considerable technical competence without an equivalent understanding of civic responsibility, society may inherit a dangerous imbalance: extraordinary power accompanied by inadequate moral restraint.
The world does not suffer from a shortage of intelligent people. It suffers, at times, from the inability of intelligent people to understand why their intelligence does not entitle them to rule others.
The Seduction of Excess and The Manufacture of Exceptionalism
One of the most troubling dimensions of Baker’s account is the manner in which privilege may be presented not as a consequence of economic inequality, but as a natural reward for intellectual superiority. The student who is invited to an exclusive gathering, offered access to investors or introduced to influential entrepreneurs may come to regard such opportunities as confirmation that he or she belongs to a different category of human being. The distinction between those who possess talent and those who possess access becomes obscured and access itself begins to masquerade as merit.
This is the point at which the sociology of elite education intersects with the psychology of power.
Pierre Bourdieu, in his analyses of cultural and social capital, demonstrated that success cannot be understood exclusively through individual ability. It is also mediated by inherited advantages, institutional recognition, social connections and familiarity with the codes through which powerful groups reproduce themselves. Stanford’s proximity to Silicon Valley makes this relationship particularly visible. An exceptional student may possess technical ability, but the ability to convert that talent into a billion-dollar enterprise depends on investors, networks, reputational endorsement and access to capital.
The mythology of the self-made innovator often obscures this institutional scaffolding. The entrepreneur is celebrated as an individual genius, while the social and economic arrangements that enabled the achievement recede into the background. The resulting narrative is seductive: the successful person deserves everything because success is presented as proof of deservingness.
Yet this argument is circular. Success demonstrates that an individual has succeeded; it does not, without further evidence, establish that the individual is morally superior, socially indispensable or entitled to disproportionate influence over others.
The danger becomes more acute when young people are introduced to extraordinary wealth before they have developed a mature understanding of its responsibilities. The lavish gathering, the private conversation with a billionaire and the promise of early investment may appear to be harmless expressions of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. But they can also establish an economy of expectation in which the student is encouraged to imagine an extraordinary future before having acquired the experience necessary to assess its consequences.
Excess, in this setting, is not simply a matter of material consumption. It is an excess of validation, opportunity and presumed importance. The student is not merely invited to succeed; the student is invited to believe that success is already the defining characteristic of his or her identity.
There is an important distinction between confidence and hubris. Confidence recognizes the possibility of achievement while remaining conscious of uncertainty. Hubris converts possibility into entitlement and treats criticism as an obstacle to be overcome rather than an opportunity for correction.
The consequences extend beyond the individual. An entrepreneur who has learnt to interpret obstacles as challenges to personal supremacy may carry that attitude into the governance of a company, the deployment of artificial intelligence, the management of employees or the design of a digital platform used by millions. The capacity to innovate becomes detached from the obligation to consider who may be harmed by innovation.
A technology founder may sincerely believe that a new product will improve the human condition. But sincerity cannot substitute for an assessment of consequences. The history of technological development repeatedly demonstrates that inventions can generate immense benefits while simultaneously creating dependencies, displacing livelihoods, concentrating information and undermining established safeguards.
The essential question is therefore not whether exceptional students should be encouraged to pursue ambitious objectives. It is whether their ambition should be accompanied by an equally serious education in the limits of private power.
When University Becomes a Marketplace
Baker’s criticism gains further force when Stanford is examined as an institution whose relationship with Silicon Valley creates powerful incentives to commercialize intellectual achievement. The university benefits from entrepreneurial networks, philanthropic wealth, research partnerships and the prestige generated by successful graduates. Investors, in turn, benefit from proximity to talented students and researchers who may become founders of valuable companies. The relationship can be mutually productive, but it also creates conflicts between the university’s public intellectual mission and the commercial interests of those surrounding it.
University is, of course, not a commercial enterprise in the ordinary sense. Its purpose encompasses teaching, research, intellectual exploration and the preservation of knowledge. Nevertheless, when institutional success is increasingly associated with the financial achievements of its graduates, the distinction between education and investment becomes less secure.
A student may arrive at university wishing to study philosophy, history, literature or physics because these disciplines illuminate the human condition. Yet the surrounding culture may repeatedly suggest that the more valuable question is how that knowledge can be converted into a scalable enterprise. A philosophical idea becomes a potential product; a scientific discovery becomes intellectual property; a promising undergraduate becomes a prospective founder whose value may be assessed before the person has had time to discover what kind of life he or she wishes to lead.
There is nothing inherently wrong with commercializing research. Medical discoveries, engineering advances and new technologies can serve humanity precisely because they are translated into practical applications. The difficulty arises when commercialization ceases to be one possible outcome of education and becomes its dominant organizing principle.
In such circumstances, the humanities risk being treated as ornamental rather than foundational. Ethics may be taught as an adjunct to computer science, while the underlying assumption that technological progress is desirable remains largely unexamined. History becomes useful only when it offers a lesson in strategy. Political philosophy becomes relevant only when it helps explain how institutions can be influenced. Even the study of human behaviour may be valued primarily for its potential to improve marketing, persuasion or the manipulation of attention.
The result is an impoverished conception of knowledge. We may become extraordinarily capable of determining how to accomplish an objective while losing the capacity to ask whether the objective is worth pursuing.
Aristotle distinguished practical wisdom, or phronesis, from technical proficiency. Technical knowledge enables a person to produce a particular result; practical wisdom involves deliberation about what constitutes a good human life and how action should be directed towards it. A society that cultivates technical ingenuity without practical wisdom may become increasingly powerful without becoming correspondingly judicious.
This distinction is especially pertinent to the technological industries emerging from Stanford’s intellectual environment. An algorithm may be efficient without being fair. A surveillance system may be commercially successful without being compatible with privacy. A platform may maximise engagement while aggravating social division. A company may achieve extraordinary financial returns while transferring environmental or social costs to people who have no meaningful opportunity to refuse them.
The market is an effective mechanism for allocating many resources, but it is not a comprehensive moral philosophy. Willingness to pay does not necessarily measure human need, and profitability does not establish social value.
A university that allows market signals to determine too much of its intellectual direction risks producing graduates who understand the price of everything that investors desire but are insufficiently prepared to evaluate the worth of things that markets cannot adequately price.
The Myth of Changing the World
Few expressions in contemporary technological culture are as attractive, or as susceptible to misuse, as the promise to change the world.
The phrase has an undeniable appeal. It suggests that a young person need not accept inherited limitations, that ingenuity can overcome scarcity and that scientific discovery can release humanity from the constraints imposed by nature. In medicine, communications, transport and countless other fields, this aspiration has produced achievements of lasting value.
Yet the expression becomes problematic when it is employed to confer moral legitimacy upon private ambition without requiring a corresponding examination of public consequences.
The aspiration to change the world contains an unanswered question: whose world, and changed according to whose preferences?
A founder may believe that artificial intelligence should transform employment, that autonomous systems should replace human decision-making, or that digital platforms should reorganize social interaction. Investors may regard these developments as opportunities for extraordinary returns. But workers whose livelihoods are disrupted, citizens whose information is harvested and communities whose social structures are transformed may understand the same changes differently.
The entrepreneur’s conception of progress is not necessarily identical to that of the people who must live with its consequences.
This problem recalls John Rawls’s theory of justice, particularly his insistence that the principles governing social institutions should be defensible without knowledge of one’s eventual position within society. The veil of ignorance asks us to imagine choosing the basic rules of a social order without knowing whether we shall occupy a position of wealth or poverty, privilege or disadvantage.
Applied to technological entrepreneurship, the question is straightforward but demanding: would those who design and deploy powerful technologies accept the risks imposed on others if they did not know whether they themselves would benefit from the innovation or bear its costs?
Would they endorse an employment system in which productivity gains accrue overwhelmingly to investors while displaced workers absorb the economic consequences? Would they support pervasive data collection if they did not know whether they would control the information or be subjected to its use? Would they welcome algorithmic decision-making without effective avenues of appeal if they could not be certain that its decisions would favour them?
The purpose of these questions is not to condemn innovation, but to subject it to a standard of reciprocity. A technological system cannot claim moral legitimacy merely because its creators possess the resources to implement it.
Baker’s account is disturbing precisely because the culture he describes may encourage certain young people to regard the ability to act at scale as evidence of a right to act. The possession of capital, technical competence and influential connections becomes a substitute for democratic authorization.
The problem is particularly serious where technology affects public goods. Digital communications, information systems, financial infrastructure and artificial intelligence increasingly influence the conditions under which citizens exercise their freedoms. When private enterprises acquire the ability to shape these conditions, their decisions may assume a quasi-governing character.
The question of who rules the world is therefore no longer confined to the conventional institutions of political authority. It also concerns those who determine the architecture of digital life, the distribution of information and the economic conditions under which individuals participate in society.
If a university teaches its most promising students to seek influence without sufficiently examining its legitimacy, it risks training future governors who have never been required to account for the governed.
The Corruption of Standards and The Price of Institutional Prestige
Perhaps the most consequential aspect of Baker’s book is that its criticism does not remain confined to the behaviour of students or the extravagances of wealthy entrepreneurs. It extends to the institutional question of whether a university can preserve its integrity when its reputation, financial interests and leadership become entangled with the culture it is expected to scrutinize.
Baker’s investigation into Stanford’s then-president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, provides the central illustration. As a freshman journalist for The Stanford Daily, Baker investigated concerns about scientific papers associated with Tessier-Lavigne’s research career. His reporting contributed to a wider institutional investigation, and Tessier-Lavigne resigned in 2023 following the publication of findings concerning serious flaws in research papers and failures to correct the scientific record adequately.
The legal and scientific distinctions must, however, be preserved. Resignation is not synonymous with the finding of fraud, and research errors, manipulated images, supervisory failures and intentional falsification are not interchangeable concepts. Tessier-Lavigne has disputed significant allegations concerning a 2009 Nature paper and the suggestion that he orchestrated a cover-up. His subsequent response maintains that the fraud narrative concerning that paper was mistaken, referring to earlier independent investigations.
These qualifications do not diminish the broader institutional question. They demonstrate why the integrity of scientific inquiry requires precise findings, independent scrutiny and a willingness to distinguish established facts from disputed allegations.
The university is entrusted with a responsibility that extends beyond its financial or reputational interests. It must protect the conditions under which knowledge can be produced, challenged and corrected. Scientific authority is not a personal possession; it is a form of public trust. The more prestigious the institution and the more influential its leadership, the greater the need for transparent accountability.
There is a danger that institutions will respond to criticism by concentrating on the management of appearances rather than the correction of underlying failures. Reputation is valuable, but its preservation cannot become an objective superior to truth. Where prestige depends on the assumption that an institution is incapable of serious error, acknowledging error becomes an existential threat rather than an essential component of institutional learning.
This is a fundamental contradiction. A university that teaches students to challenge established assumptions while discouraging scrutiny of its own leadership undermines the very intellectual independence it claims to cultivate.
The same contradiction can arise in the technology sector. A company that celebrates disruption may resist the regulatory scrutiny necessary to protect consumers. An entrepreneur who praises transparency may rely on contractual arrangements that prevent employees from disclosing wrongdoing. An institution that celebrates meritocracy may tolerate misconduct by those whose wealth or connections make them difficult to challenge.
In such an environment, ethics becomes conditional. Rules apply rigorously to those without influence but are interpreted flexibly when powerful interests are at stake.
The consequences are not merely reputational. They undermine confidence in the institutions responsible for validating knowledge and governing technological development. When the public suspects that scientific conclusions, corporate claims or institutional investigations are shaped by financial incentives, the authority of expertise itself becomes vulnerable.
Baker’s achievement as a student journalist is therefore significant beyond the immediate controversy. His investigation illustrates the continuing importance of independent journalism in institutions that possess substantial resources and strong incentives to protect their reputations. The fact that a young reporter could challenge powerful figures also demonstrates that intellectual courage is not necessarily a product of seniority, wealth or institutional rank.
It is sometimes the person with the least invested in preserving an established hierarchy who is best positioned to question it.
T
he Wider World Pays the Price
The consequences of a culture that confuses exceptional intelligence with exceptional entitlement are not confined to Stanford or Silicon Valley. They may be experienced by workers, consumers, citizens and communities far removed from the institutions in which technological power is cultivated.
Consider the distribution of economic gains. Technology may substantially increase productivity, but the social consequences depend on who controls the technology, who owns the resulting intellectual property and how the benefits are distributed. If the gains accrue principally to investors and founders while workers bear the costs of displacement, technological progress may coexist with declining economic security for large sections of society.
The same problem arises in the governance of artificial intelligence. Systems developed by a relatively small number of corporations can influence employment, education, credit, public administration and access to information. The individuals designing these systems may be exceptionally capable, but technical competence does not automatically confer democratic legitimacy.
Nor does the capacity to predict human behaviour confer a right to manipulate it.
The danger is that the concentration of technological expertise and financial resources may create a new form of private sovereignty. Traditional sovereignty is exercised through recognised institutions of public authority, subject, at least in principle, to constitutional limits and democratic accountability. Technological platforms, by contrast, may exercise considerable influence through the design of systems that individuals use every day, often without meaningful alternatives or a clear understanding of how decisions are made.
A platform’s terms of service may determine the conditions under which millions communicate. An algorithm may influence which information receives public attention. An automated system may shape a person’s employment prospects or access to financial services. These are not merely commercial decisions when their cumulative consequences affect the effective exercise of individual rights.
The underlying problem is one of accountability. Who is answerable when a system causes harm? Who determines whether the risk was justified? What remedies are available to the individual whose interests were subordinated to commercial efficiency?
These questions become more difficult when innovators conceive of regulation as an impediment to progress rather than as a means of ensuring that progress remains compatible with the public interest.
The consequences may also be international. Technological systems developed within wealthy jurisdictions can be deployed across countries whose regulatory institutions possess fewer resources or whose populations have limited bargaining power. The benefits of innovation may be captured by corporations in technologically advanced economies, while the associated social, economic and environmental costs are distributed elsewhere.
Developing countries may find themselves dependent on infrastructure, platforms and intellectual property over which they exercise little control. Their citizens may generate valuable data without sharing proportionately in the economic returns derived from it. Their public institutions may become reliant on technologies whose underlying design, operation and accountability remain outside their effective jurisdiction.
The relationship between technological power and global inequality is therefore not incidental. It is a question of international justice.
For countries that lack the capital and research infrastructure of Silicon Valley, the challenge is not simply to produce more talented graduates. It is to establish conditions under which technological development advances national capabilities, protects citizens and distributes benefits fairly. Importing technology without developing the institutional capacity to govern it may reproduce dependence rather than overcome it.
The world does not need fewer innovators. It needs institutions capable of ensuring that innovation serves purposes that are socially defensible.
Recovering The Moral Purpose of Education
What, then, should universities learn from Baker’s account?
The first requirement is to recover a conception of education that recognizes the intrinsic value of intellectual development. A university should prepare students for employment and entrepreneurship, but it should also enable them to understand history, political institutions, moral philosophy and the consequences of human action. Education should cultivate the capacity to question the objectives that society presents as self-evidently desirable.
This requires more than adding an ethics course to an otherwise unchanged curriculum. Ethics cannot be treated as a peripheral subject if the central institutional culture rewards conduct that places commercial success above social responsibility. The principles taught in the classroom must be reflected in the university’s own governance, research practices, financial relationships and treatment of dissent.
Second, universities should examine the relationship between private funding and academic independence. Philanthropy and investment can support important research, but the terms on which financial support is accepted must preserve institutional autonomy. Conflicts of interest should be disclosed, allegations of misconduct investigated independently, and findings communicated transparently.
Third, universities should resist the temptation to treat students as investments whose value depends on their prospects for generating exceptional financial returns. A student who becomes a successful entrepreneur has achieved something worthwhile, but so has the scholar who preserves an endangered language, the scientist whose research produces no immediate commercial application, the teacher who transforms the lives of disadvantaged children and the public servant who strengthens democratic institutions.
Their contributions may be difficult to express in the language of venture capital, but that does not make them less valuable.
Finally, students must be taught that power carries obligations proportionate to its reach. The capacity to influence millions of lives should invite greater scrutiny, not greater immunity. The more consequential a person’s decisions become, the stronger the justification required for imposing risks on others.
This is not an argument for restraining ambition. It is an argument for educating ambition.
The distinction matters because ambition can be directed towards radically different ends. It can become an instrument of self-enrichment, or it can motivate the pursuit of discoveries that alleviate suffering and expand human freedom. It can encourage a person to dominate others, or it can inspire the construction of institutions in which others enjoy greater opportunities.
A university’s responsibility is not to determine every student’s destination. It is to ensure that the journey towards achievement does not become an education in indifference.
My Take
The enduring significance of How to Rule the World lies in the contradiction contained in its title. To rule the world may be understood as the ultimate expression of human ambition, but it may equally be interpreted as a warning about the dangers of allowing ambition to become its own justification.
Baker’s account portrays a world in which exceptional young people are courted by wealthy individuals who recognize the commercial potential of their intelligence. It reveals how access, money and institutional prestige can combine to create opportunities unavailable to most students. It also examines the consequences when the pursuit of success becomes entangled with a culture in which ethical boundaries are treated as negotiable and institutional reputation becomes an end in itself.
Yet the appropriate conclusion is not that Stanford is uniquely culpable, or that Silicon Valley’s achievements should be dismissed. The more important lesson is that the institutional arrangements surrounding extraordinary talent determine, in part, the purposes towards which that talent is directed.
A society may possess the most sophisticated technologies, the most brilliant scientists and the most resourceful entrepreneurs, yet remain morally deficient if it cannot ensure that their achievements are compatible with the dignity and interests of others.
The ancient Greek understanding of hubris offers a useful warning. The danger is not excellence itself, but the failure to recognize limits. Contemporary technological culture has acquired an unprecedented capacity to overcome physical, economic and informational constraints. It has not necessarily acquired a corresponding capacity to judge when restraint is required.
The university must therefore remain more than a recruitment ground for capital, a laboratory for commercial experimentation or a gateway to elite status. It must be a place in which students encounter the limits of their own assumptions, learn to distinguish power from legitimacy and recognize that the ability to alter the lives of others creates obligations that cannot be discharged merely by pointing to the benefits of innovation.
There is, moreover, a final irony in Baker’s narrative. His investigation of institutional power was itself an achievement of the education that he came to question. It demonstrates that a university can produce individuals capable of challenging the very structures that surround them. The possibility of criticism is not evidence that the institution has failed completely; it is evidence that its intellectual purpose remains recoverable. The challenge is to make such independence an institutional principle rather than an exceptional act of individual courage.
The world does not need a generation of young people who have been taught that they are destined to rule it. It needs a generation capable of understanding why no individual, however gifted, wealthy or technologically accomplished, can claim an unrestricted right to determine its future.
The true measure of education is not how many future billionaires it produces, how rapidly its graduates accumulate influence, or how effectively they disrupt established industries. It is whether those who leave its halls possess the wisdom to distinguish what they can do from what they ought to do.
For in the final analysis, the question is not whether Stanford can teach its most gifted students how to rule the world. It is whether Stanford, and universities like it, can teach them that the world is not theirs to rule in the first place.
