Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the richest guy of all?

Not Bill Gates. He doesn’t even come in second anymore.

After 13 years as the world’s wealthiest person, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, a symbol of the New Economy, has lost the title to a guy who famously said he didn’t understand technology: Warren Buffett, who heads insurance giant Berkshire Hathaway.

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Now mobile motormouths will never have to stop talking.

In a stunning move that could entice tens of millions of Americans to entirely drop landlines, first Verizon Wireless and then AT&T announced Tuesday that they are now offering unlimited voice calling for $99.99 a month. The plans are available nationwide and can be combined with the carriers’ unlimited mobile data offerings.

3:00 P.M. UPDATE: T-Mobile just announced its own all-you-can-talk offering. The value-oriented carrier is offering unlimited calls and mobile messages for $99.99 a month.

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After months of thinking about it, Microsoft finally made a bid for Yahoo this morning, offering $44.6 billion, or $31 a share.

The folks in Redmond must be getting soft in the head with all that rain up there. This deal is crazy. Bill Gates is obviously spending way too much time thinking about philanthropy, since this move is essentially a charitable gift to Yahoo shareholders and archrival Google.

How so?

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Google just announced that it will bid in the Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming auction of 700 MHz wireless spectrum. Maybe my column urging them them to go for it persuaded them.

“Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a statement. “No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.” Schmidt, of course, hopes they access Google services.

Entering the bidding for the right to build a new wireless network is a big gamble for a company whose core business is manipulating mathematical formulas to deliver Web search results.

If Google wins, it will find itself dealing with the messy details of owning and operating a cellular-phone network. It means negotiating to put up towers, investing billions in new equipment, setting up a marketing and billing and support operation.

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We all suspected that marketers manipulate the popularity ratings on YouTube the sane way they game Web search results. Now a marketer has revealed the tricks of the trade.

In a guest post on TechCrunch Thanksgiving Day, Dan Ackerman Greenberg of new-media firm The Comotion Group explains the dirty little secrets of getting a video into the “most viewed” rankings on Google’s YouTube.

In addition to common-sense stuff like making videos short and offering easy links to related videos in a series, Greenberg suggests some shadier tactics: 

• Deleting negative comments and using insiders to post fake comments to start a buzz of controversy about a video
• Paying bloggers to embed links to the video
• Posting provocative but misleading headlines
• Gratuitously including pictures of sexy women
• Spamming links via e-mail, Facebook and MySpace pages

Sleazy? You betcha. After getting flooded with criticism, Greenberg posted a followup claiming he doesn’t endorse all the techniques, but was merely describing the full range of tools used by modern marketers. Um, yeah.

I was catching up on the Fake Steve Jobs blog today and stumbled on this funny Fake Prayer from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

If I reprint the whole thing, Fake Steve (or more likely, his earnest employer, Forbes) will probably sue me for copyright infringement despite all the free publicity I gave Fake Steve’s book and appearance at Kepler’s.

So here’s the beginning of the prayer:

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I’ve been eagerly awaiting the advent of a possible gPhone ever since August. So I was happy Monday when Google finally announced that it was offering a package of mobile phone software to handset makers and developers.

But as I argue in my Wednesday column, Google needs to become a mobile phone carrier (at least in the U.S.) if it really wants to bring the world wide openness of the Web to mobile phones. And frankly, I think Google Wireless could be a lot better than what we have now.

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Google is gaga about space.

It’s not just the Lunar X Prize for the first and second private unmanned robots to land on the moon (click here for more on the contest).

As I lay out in my Sunday column, the Mountain View king of Internet search has more space-related projects than the solar system has planets, from putting up maps of Mars to scanning all of NASA’s photos and documents. It’s paying the U.S. space agency about $3 million a year to fund 15 researchers doing odd projects, like trying to turn algae in the South Bay into a sustainable energy source. The company has even hired a real spacewalker, former astronaut Ed Lu.

What does outer space have to do with Google’s core business? Not much, at least directly. Google doesn’t currently put ads on its space pages and products, so it gets no revenue from them.

But making, say, photos from the Apollo mission easily accessible does subtly reinforce Google’s brand, especially with impressionable young people. They will quickly learn, if they haven’t already, that they want to find information about anything, their first stop should be Google.

Woo-hoo, the gPhones are coming!

HTC, a Taiwanese maker of mobile phone handsets, will ship 50,000 Google phones by the end of 2007, according to a UBS analyst report quoted by Eric Savitz of Barron’s in his Tech Trader blog.

(3 P.M. UPDATE: I missed this earlier, but Lehman Brothers said Tuesday that Google will launch a phone in February, probably made by HTC. “Lehman believes the phone could be marketed to consumers at a price lower than $100 or potentially might be free. It expects the Google phone will offer Wi-Fi capability and a large screen,” reports the blog This Week in Consumer Electronics.)

The UBS analyst, Benjamin Schacter, says the phones will only be available to developers (and, I’m sure, a few selected Friends of Google).

Schacter says it’s unclear whether Google will ever try to produce any hardware itself. Most recent reports, including one a few days ago from the New York Times, say that the “gPhone” is really a Linux-based operating system and suite of related applications for phones that is designed to compete with Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian and Apple’s iPhone software.

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Chalk up another victory for the new economy over the old: Google’s 34-year-old founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have made Forbes magazine’s “top 10″ list of richest Americans. (UPDATE: They are the youngest people ever to crack the top 10, says the Mercury News.)

Three other Googlers – CEO Eric Schmidt, Omid Kordestani and Ram Shriram — also made Forbes’ annual list of the 400 richest Americans. (Check out the entire list of 400 here.) And two venture capitalists, John Doerr and Michael Moritz, who made gazillions as early investors in the search giant pop up in the rankings, too. (UPDATE: See how Silicon Valley’s 24 richest people stacked up in this handy chart.)

Riding a 403 percent increase in the search giant’s stock price over the past year, the Google Guys tied each other for No. 5 on the prestigious tally, with an estimated net worth of $18.5 billion apiece. (Last year, they were worth a piddling $14 billion.)

Brin and Page essentially swapped spots with the Walton family, heirs to Wal-Mart Stores founder Sam Walton, who moved down to 12th place this year as their company’s stock fell 17 percent.

Silicon Valley’s other Larry — Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison — is still the wealthiest guy in town. At $26 billion, he’s the fourth-richest American, and he’s 33 percent richer than last year.

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