The University Corrupted by Silicon Valley | How Power Works with Theo Baker

Stanford University doesn't just sit next to Silicon Valley. It built it, funds it, and profits from it. In this conversation, journalist Theo Baker, author of How to Rule the World, takes us inside the university's most secretive institution: a 12-student-a-year class literally called "How to Rule the World," taught by a Silicon Valley CEO who interrogates applicants about their deepest secrets before letting them in.

Baker unpacks how Stanford has spent decades blurring the line between education and enrichment where professors become billionaires off their students' startups, where "pre-idea funding" hands teenagers millions before they have a business plan, and where a campus survey found nearly half of computer science majors would rather cheat than fail.

At the centre of the story is the downfall of former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavine, ousted after a research misconduct investigation into a landmark Alzheimer's study. As Baker argues, many of Silicon Valley's worst harms don't come from malicious actors, but from a system engineered without accountability. One that rewards winning at all costs and treats "a little bit of fraud" as the price of doing business.

From Elizabeth Holmes to Sam Bankman-Fried to Do Kwon, the pattern keeps repeating. Baker asks: is this a few bad apples, or the predictable output of the system Stanford built?

Like PoliticsJOE? We need your support:

Chapters