Warner Bros, Amy Pascal Win ‘How To Rule The World’ Auction; Freshman Theo Baker Forced Resignation Of Nobel-Shortlisted Stanford President With Articles For School’s Newspaper

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros and producer Amy Pascal have emerged victorious in a spirited book-rights auction for How to Rule the World: Yacht Parties, Culture Wars and the Downfall of a President at Stanford. Written by Theo Baker, book tells his story of being an 18-year-old freshman at Stanford who wrote a series of reports for the university’s newspaper skeptical of the questionable research practices of the school’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who was on the short list for the Nobel Prize.

The college president responded by hiring a top law firm and big PR firm to take down the neophyte journalist, who wrote the pieces for The Stanford Daily. Baker wound up being named the youngest-ever recipient of a Polk Award, and in late summer the Stanford president and neuroscientist resigned — though he remains a member of the faculty.

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Tessier-Lavigne’s research — he was a top exec for Bay Area biotech company Genentech — was debunked, with Baker discovering things like photoshopping. Despite years of online rumors about the research that left the cub reporter a bread-crumb trail, nobody scrutinized the president’s work. Not until the strong work by a fresh-faced young man who looks like Jimmy Olsen from the original Superman series. He has journalism in the blood: his mother is New Yorker writer Susan Glasser and dad is Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times.

The book will be published by Penguin Press/Penguin Random House.

Sony, Amazon, and A24 were also in the hunt for the book. CAA brokered the deal.

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