If you look at CEOs in comics, the heroes tend to have inherited their businesses, Julian Sanchez notes, while the villains have built theirs up from nothing:
While the pattern in comics inverts the meritocratic ideal that seems to rule in most modern American fiction, it fits quite naturally with a pre-capitalist aristocratic ethos, which persisted at least through the early 20th century in the form of Old Money’s contempt for the nouveau riche. Jane Jacobs, in her book Systems of Survival, contrasted this aristocratic view, which she dubbed the “Guardian” moral complex, with “bourgeois” or “mercantile” ethics.
In this worldview, while wealth and the leisure time it affords may be necessary preconditions of cultivating certain noble qualities (whether that’s appreciation of classical art and literature, or the martial, deductive, and scientific skills of a masked crimefighter), the grubby business of acquiring money is inherently corrupting. The ideal noble needs to have wealth, while being too refined to be much concerned with becoming wealthy.
It’s permissible for Stark and Kord to be largely responsible for the success of their companies because their contribution is essentially a side effect of their exercise of their intellectual virtues. Along similar lines, while the Fantastic Four have plainly become enormously wealthy from the income stream generated by Reed Richards’ many patents, I don’t recall many scenes in which we see Richards stepping out of the lab to apply his intelligence directly to their commercialization: His inventions are presumably sold or licensed to others who concern themselves with transforming Richards’ genius into cash.
A similar pattern holds for literally noble or aristocratic power in comics. Princess Diana (Wonder Woman) and T’Challa (Black Panther) are hereditary royalty. Doctor Doom and Magneto are members of despised and oppressed minority groups (Doom is Roma; Magneto a Jewish mutant) who actively seize leadership of Latveria and Genosha, respectively. Democratic power doesn’t fare too much better: Lex Luthor was briefly president of the United States.
The logic of this, as I apprehend it, is that the hero must wield enormous power in order to effectively perform the superheroic function, but cannot seem to seek it too eagerly, even for admirable ends — perhaps particularly when we consider that they typically make use of their great economic power by translating it into a superhuman capacity for physical violence. Spider-Man is always reminding us that “with great power comes great responsibility” — but the responsibility is the noblesse oblige of one who has (often reluctantly) found that power thrust upon him.
Bruce Wayne is perhaps the most obvious exception to this general pattern. While for Spider-Man, unasked-for power comes with the burden of responsibility, it is the burden of an obsessive sense of responsibility that comes first for Wayne, driving a protracted quest for hard-won mental and physical power. While every superhero has an iconic “origin story,” Batman is unusual among costumed crimefighters in that his long and laborious efforts to acquire his skills and powers are themselves a major part of the narrative. In Wayne’s case, this deliberate striving after power is at least partially purged of its ordinary villainous connotations because it is itself depicted as an unwanted compulsion, thrust upon him unasked (like a radioactive spider bite) by the ghosts of his murdered parents. It is not, I think, an accident that this most calculating, ruthless, and unsentimental of the major superheroes is also the one super-CEO most commonly depicted as being exceptionally skilled qua businessman. He is allowed this quality in part because, in sharp contrast to Tony Stark, he is not depicted as deriving much genuine enjoyment from the luxurious playboy lifestyle he uses as a smokescreen to cover his compulsive crimefighting.
Protagonists in ordinary popular fiction, like most of us most of the time, are allowed to seek their own happiness — and we’re allowed to share that happiness, through our identification with them — in line with ordinary bourgeois morality. But what makes superheroes “super” (and not merely heroic) is precisely their extraordinary capability to exercise coercive power and dominate others. In their case, bourgeois norms have to yield to the Guardian ethos — which, when their power is partly economic in origin, requires turning pop fiction’s ordinary meritocratic ideals on their head, at least in that limited domain.
Ah, yes. Consider He-Man, who with his beautiful friends flies — yes, flies — around their domains of medieval peasants, faultlessly foiling Skeletor’s plans to change things for the better.
Who’s the villain, there?
Maybe generations of breeding have taught us the divine right of kings.