Phoebe Gates took a secret Stanford class on how to ‘rule the world’—and reportedly recruited employees for her startup accused of wire fraud

Long before Phoebe Gates cofounded the AI personal shopping assistant Phia , she was a student at Stanford University working towards a bachelor’s degree in human biology.

While her transcript reflects coursework in epidemiology and health policy analysis, Gates attended one secret winter-quarter class that reportedly helped her establish Phia.

The 10-week off-the-record course, titled “ So You Think You Can Rule the World? ” or simply referred to as “Rule” among Stanford students, required a referral from another student and wasn’t available through the college’s official course registration, The Stanford Daily reported in May.

The course teaches “how to essentially hack any kind of power structure or bureaucratic structure and get what they want in a system of people,” a former student, who preferred to remain anonymous, told the student newspaper.

The unofficial course focused on prisoner’s dilemmas, multipolar traps, and readings by Peter Thiel and Paul Graham.

It admitted only six women and six men per quarter, selected by its professor Justin Lewis-Weber, a 2020 Stanford graduate and founder of insurance technology startup Assured .

Lewis-Weber began teaching the course during his junior year at the college.

Scrutiny of “Rule” includes allegations of a “cult of personality” and the inspiration for a memoir by 2026 Stanford graduate Theo Baker, titled “How to Rule the World,” published in May.

“Justin’s class, it turned out, wasn’t a real class in the sense of earning course credit, although there were lectures, discussions, and guest speakers, and it was held each week on Stanford’s campus,” Baker wrote in his memoir.

“It was more like a secret society, a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite.” Baker interviewed for the course with Lewis-Weber in November 2022, while Gates was in the cohort, but was ultimately denied from participating.

Baker described the bizarre interview process with the professor, who he believes aimed to confuse and harangue potential students.

“Justin was networking with teenagers he expected to be useful in the future,” Baker continued, adding the professor “knew that a certain elite cohort of Stanford students wouldn’t be able to resist the mystique he cultivated, the notion of this insider class no one would speak about, where only the very best of the best congregated to learn the secrets of the billionaires they aspired to become.” Baker’s memoir explains that the objective of Lewis-Weber’s class is to teach students how to take advantage of others and find loopholes within rules, a very different approach to leadership compared to Stanford’s typical entrepreneurship classes.