Facebook CEO tops Vanity Fair’s most influential list

And all it took was half a billion friends.

Vanity Fair has crowned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg the Caesar of our day, and anointed Palo Alto the new Rome. Really.

The 26-year-old mogul has landed at the top of the magazine’s 100 most influential list, beating out Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who checked in at No. 2, and the Google triad of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt, who took the third spot on the tech-heavy ranking.

So the leaders of Facebook, Apple and Google, in descending order, are the leading influencers of the information age. One could certainly make the argument without sounding like a fool.