Two years ago, when Facebook recruited its 100-millionth user, a celebratory toga party was thrown by C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, a classics buff who is prone to spontaneously reciting Homeric verses from memory. Since then the stunningly successful Web site has quintupled its size to a staggering half-billion participants worldwide, and that slender 26-year-old cloaked in the hoodie—Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus! This year Vanity Fair anoints Zuck as our new Caesar. He rules from the imperial capital of Palo Alto, California, the Rome of our nascent millennium. In this, the 16th annual ranking of the 100 most 
 
 
 
 Peter Newcomb and Adrienne Gaffney report on the achievements of those who might find their way onto the next New Establishment list. Peter Newcomb and Adrienne Gaffney report on the achievements of those who might find their way onto the next New Establishment list. 
 
 influential people of the Information Age,has also heaped some new honors on that other prince of Palo Alto, Steve Jobs, now that his Apple is worth even more than those great conquerors Google and Microsoft. Time and again Jobs has ascended the stage to reveal what he would majestically proclaim to be yet another revolutionary device that would transform media and communications—and every time he has been remarkably prescient.He’s a vegan! 
 
 » Go the 100 
 
 —By Alan Deutschman, Peter Newcomb, Richard Siklos, Duff McDonald, and Jessica Flint. Research and reporting by Adrienne Gaffney. 
 
 MARK ZUCKERBERG 
 
 FACEBOOK 
 
 WORLD-DOMINATION WATCH: The wildly popular social-networking Web site, valued at around $25 billion, added its 500-millionth member this summer, and those “friends” share more than 30 billion pieces of information a month. Facebook runs more banner advertisements than any other Web site (176 billion a quarter) and drives more U.S. visitor traffic to some sites than even Google. Revenues this year could reach $2 billion. 
 
 THE PRICE OF MOGULDOM: In June, at The Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference, as columnists Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher interrogated him about privacy issues, Zuckerberg appeared uncomfortable, sweated profusely, and even—gasp!—took off his signature black hoodie. 
 
 Photograph by Brian Solis. 
 
 STEVE JOBS 
 
 APPLE 
 
 STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Having saved the music business and conquered the smartphone market, Jobs is now looking to salvage the publishing industry—and forever alter the world of mobile computing—with the iPad. Released amid a Parousian frenzy, the one-and-a-half-pound computer tablet sold one million units in just 28 days, a milestone that took the now ubiquitous iPod nearly two years to reach. With sales of iPhones expected to top $20 billion this year, up from $630 million in 2007, it’s no wonder that Apple blew past Google and Microsoft to become the most valuable tech company on the planet. 
 
 UNLIKELY FOE: Consumer Reports, which, even after Jobs finally addressed the iPhone 4’s antenna issues, refuses to recommend the phone. 
 
 Photograph by Matt Yohe. 
 
 SERGEY BRIN, LARRY PAGE, and ERIC SCHMIDT 
 
 GOOGLE 
 
 SWORN ENEMY: Steve Jobs, who characterized Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” as bullshit. Jobs reportedly felt betrayed by his erstwhile allies for their muscling in on the lucrative mobile-devices business, which the geekocracy now believes is the future of computing. Critics predicted that Google’s Android phones might eclipse the iPhone by 2012. It’s war between the two companies now, a surprising shift from not long ago, when Schmidt sat on Apple’s board, Brin and Page looked to Jobs as a mentor and role model, and Brin and Jobs would take walks together in the Santa Cruz Mountains. 
 
 ROAD NOT TAKEN: Ken Auletta revealed in Googled that the trio discussed buying The New York Times. 
 
 Photograph by Patrick McMullan Co. (Brin, Page) and Charles Haynes (Schmidt). 
 
 RUPERT MURDOCH 
 
 NEWS CORPORATION 
 
 BUSINESS AS USUAL: The 79-year-old media mogul is at his best when waging war with those he perceives to be his rivals (The New York Times, Time Warner Cable, Google). His latest adversary: online news aggregators that steal (his word) content from his far-flung media outlets. Last year he threatened to remove all News Corp. content from Google’s search engine (an apparent bluff), and then announced that if people wished to read some of his papers online they would have to pay a price. It’s a battle he is unlikely to win, but it’s helping turn Murdoch into something of a print-world savior. 
 
 HOLLYWOOD RELATIONS: Thanks to director James Cameron’s Avatar, the Fox film division posted a record quarterly profit of $497 million. 
 
 Photograph by Patrick McMullan Co. 
 
 JEFF BEZOS 
 
 AMAZON 
 
 HIGH POINTS: Bezos’s pioneering Kindle has captured about 60 percent of the U.S. e-reader market, though now it’s being challenged by Apple’s way-cool iPad and Google’s soon-to-open online bookstore. Amazon now sells more digital books than hardcover ones. 
 
 THORN IN HIS SIDE: John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, one of the Big Six book publishers, opposed Amazon’s effort to impose a top price of $9.99 for e-books, which would have undercut the much higher prices (and profit margins) for paper ones. As punishment Bezos dropped Macmillan’s titles, but later relented and agreed to sell them for “needlessly high” prices. 
 
 Photograph by James Duncan Davidson. 
 
 BERNARD ARNAULT 
 
 LVMH 
 
 WHEN CASH IS KING: Europe’s richest man nearly doubled his net worth, to $27.5 billion, according to Forbes, as Arnault guided his luxury empire through the worst of the global downturn and surfaced strongly in early 2010. 
 
 PERSISTENT RUMOR: Arnault is said to be interested in buying the Hermès Group, the famed French leather-and-fashion house, but the dynastic family isn’t interested in selling. 
 
 Photograph by Patrick McMullan Co. 
 
 MICHAEL BLOOMBERG 
 
 MAYOR, NEW YORK CITY; BLOOMBERG L.P. 
 
 STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: Though the mayor occasionally gets swept up in small fights (smokers, soda drinkers, food vendors), New York is in as good a shape as it has ever been. Bloomberg has reduced crime, improved public education, and instituted a number of large-scale civic initiatives that are as ambitious as any big city’s in the country. 
 
 GOOD HELP IS HARD TO FIND: This summer, a trusted political consultant, John Haggerty Jr., was accused of stealing $1.1 million from the mayor during last year’s election campaign (he has pleaded not guilty). Haggerty allegedly used most of the money to buy a house. 
 
 Photograph by Patrick McMullan Co. 
 
 LARRY ELLISON 
 
 ORACLE 
 
 CAN BE PROUD OF: The software mogul’s sailing team captured the America’s Cup in February, achieving the first U.S. victory since 1992, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars drawn from the third-biggest American fortune after Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffett’s—all three of whom have pledged, along with 37 other billionaires, to give at least half of their fortunes to charity. 
 
 SWORN ENEMY: Jonathan Schwartz gained notoriety as one of the first C.E.O. bloggers (an uncommonly good one, too) before Ellison, who topped The Wall Street Journal’s list of highest-paid C.E.O.’s of the decade, collecting $1.84 billion, acquired Schwartz’s struggling company, Sun Microsystems, and began dissing him in the press, saying, “Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.” Schwartz later announced his resignation on Twitter. 
 
 Photograph courtesy Oracle. 
 
 EVAN WILLIAMS and BIZ STONE 
 
 TWITTER 
 
 HERE TO STAY AFTER ALL? The enormously popular microblogging service has signed up an astonishing 124 million registered users (increasing by 300,000 a day). People “tweet” more than one billion times a month and search Twitter over 800 million times a day. 
 
 NOT SO FAST: Critics were underwhelmed when Twitter revealed its moneymaking plans in April: charging companies such as Starbucks and Sony Pictures for “promoted tweets,” otherwise known as ads. 
 
 Photographs by Joi Ito. 
 
 JOHN MALONE 
 
 LIBERTY MEDIA ||||| Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and other Silicon Valley power players on Wednesday announced their funding of the Life Sciences Breakthrough Prize, a new biology competition intended to incentivize the search for cures for humanity's most troublesome diseases. 
 
 Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, who last year established a similar $3 million prize for achievements in physics, Brin's wife Anne Wojcicki, founder of genetics company 23andMe, and Zuckerberg's wife Priscilla Chan were also named as founding sponsors. Zuckerberg, Wojcicki, Milner, and Apple and Genetech chairman Art Levinson make up the Life Sciences Breakthrough Prize foundation board, with Levinson serving as chairman. 
 
 The principals gathered in San Francisco Wednesday to announce the establishment of the award and name 11 inaugural prize-winners. Their foundation plans to issue five annual prizes following this year's one-time splurgewith each $3 million award representing more than twice the amount Nobel Prize winners receive, The New York Times noted. 
 
 "Curing a disease should be worth more than a touchdown," Brin said in a statement, explaining the size of the cash prize. 
 
 Milner added that his earlier solo effort to reward accomplishments in physics wasn't enough in the life sciences, where "[s]olving the enormous complexity of human diseases calls for a much bigger effort compared to fundamental physics and therefore requires multiple sponsors to reward outstanding achievements." 
 
 The first eleven Life Sciences Breakthrough Prize laureates are Cornelia Bargmann, David Botstein, Lewis Cantley, Hans Clevers, Napoleone Ferrara, Titia de Lange, Eric Lander, Charles Sawyers, Bert Vogelstein, Robert Weinberg, Shinya Yamanaka. The prize-winners' accomplishments are listed on the Life Sciences Breakthrough Prize foundation's newly launched website. 
 
 "These scientists should be household names and heroes in society," Wojcicki was quoted as saying by the Times, adding that the foundation would single out researchers "who think big, take risks and have made a significant impact on our lives." 
 
 Zuckerberg said the prize was a way for the tech industry to assist the medical and biological communities in seeking answers to complicated problems that affect us all, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The Facebook co-founder added that a major goal of the founding sponsors was to inspire and incentivize the life scientists of tomorrow. 
 
 "A lot of this is about the next generation of folks, college students and grad students in labs," the Chronicle quoted him as saying. "Hopefully we can create something that will make them want to [take chances and find cures]. I hope what we've done can serve as that platform. And others will create other prizes to serve other philanthropic efforts."
– The biggest intellectual, cultural, and technological achievements of the year were powered by these brains—some we know well, some we don’t. The Daily Beast got together with 20-plus recent winners of MacArthur “Genius” grant to determine the year’s smartest: Jon Stewart. Going beyond the biting Daily Show, Stewart "turned his logic-rooted, hypocrisy-bashing comedy into action" by organizing the Rally to Restore Sanity and pushing hard—and successfully—for the passage of the 9/11 first responders health bill. Bill and Melinda Gates. These days, for Mr. and Mrs. Microsoft, it’s all about philanthropy. This year, their Giving Pledge called on billionaires like themselves to give away at least half their money. Some estimate they'll get commitments totaling $150 billion. Steve Jobs. The Apple frontman brought out the iPad and iPhone 4; Apple TV was hot; the Beatles hit iTunes. Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook hit 500 million users this year, greasing Zuck's path toward Time's Person of the Year. J. Craig Venter. The scientist's team developed the first organism whose genome was synthetic, a 15-year project whose results he revealed this year. See the other 15 smartest people.