A villain who constantly fails at beating the heroes never realizestheir intellect and hard work might mean they'd get a lot more done if they did an honest day's work; any attempt at going straight is simply a ruse to lull heroes into a false sense of security. This may be more a factor of maintaining the Status Quo, and it's usually mentioned that the Mad Scientist is mad after all. Sometimes lampshaded at a villain's death with "If only he'd used his powers for good, instead of for evil." This is a dying trope as comic book characters became more complex, but was extremely common for many villains decades ago. Also, it ties closely into Reed Richards Is Useless — even if The Government gets ahold of secondhand ultratech, they just use it for ill-conceived attempts to either conquer other nations or abuse their citizens.
Consider, for a moment, the Trope Namer: Lex Luthor. His earliest incarnations were generally focused on using his mad scientist inventions for the sort of schemes typical in The Golden Age of Comic Books and The Silver Age of Comic Books, with the goals of pure monetary gain, "ruling the world", or eliminating Superman as an obstacle to monetary gain and ruling the world... The question is then raised as to why he just doesn't sell his amazing inventions legally.
In the Post Crisis world, however, Luthor was recreated as a Corrupt Corporate Executive, already a multi-billionaire captain of industry before even meeting Supes. Now, having far more cash than a man could ever spend in one lifetime, Luthor's only want is power, and while he certainly has a great deal of it already, he wants more... and Superman, he feels, is standing in his way. It's later established that he became a billionaire specifically through marketing his brilliant inventions.
The current Luthor is a far cry from a purely Mad Scientist, he thus avoids the trope.
When this is avoided, the turn to the side of good is usually planned well in advance. Heroes may even precipitate it by simply asking "And Then What?" (Step Three: Profit).
Sometimes this trope is subverted by villains who start out using their talents for legitimate gain, but who end up becoming villains for one reason or another. Another subversion can be when the villain really does go straight, and is able to use the skills he demonstrated in his criminal career to land a legitimate job. This last one is Truth in Television for former criminals who manage to find legitimate work, or even start their own businesses, after getting busted. Compare Reluctant Mad Scientist.
See Also: Fake Real Turn where a business that is serving as a front operation for a criminal activity or organization becomes so successful in its own right that characters decide to pursue it as a legitimate business. And You Could Have Used Your Powers For Good.
Compare Reed Richards Is Useless, Screw The Rules, I Have Supernatural Powers!, and Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat. Contrast Visionary Villain and Pragmatic Villainy. See also Science Related Memetic Disorder and Sanity Has Advantages for the possible justifications of this trope. Can end up leading to Boxed Crook when put into practice.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
Mazinger Z: Dr.Hell is wealthy and intelligent enough to build dozens of giganticwar machines, Doomsday weapons, squads of cyborgs, several HQ, aircrafts, submarines... It was kind of justified in one of the different manga continuities when Dr. Hell revealed shortly after finding the old Mykene's mechanical warriors, CountBrocken took over several ancient European Mafia in order to earn cash for Hell. However he will not use his talents for legitimate -and less frustration-inducing- gain because he sees himself like The Woobie and wants making the whole humankind paying for all humilliations and hurt he suffered in the past. He NEEDS enslaving everybody and making them bowing down to him.
Pumpkin Scissors. This trope is almost the premise of the series — this is a world where rather than building safer tanks or devices to protect people from chemical weapons, they engineer people who can withstand tank-fire and chemical weapons. Lampshaded in the interlude where a lab assistant finds a report about the protective fluid that the Flamethrower Troopers use and mentions that they could be used to help burn victims. Her superior replies to that by telling her to throw it out because he doesn't need it anymore.
The Team Rocket trio in the Pokémon anime invents some of the most impressive Death Traps one could ever imagine, almost every episode... until they occasionally run out of money. They're also not above taking and maintaining legit work, until the inevitable screw up, and it's always manual labor anyway. Ironically, their "honest" work is almost always profitable.
It's mentioned in one episode of the Johto series that they borrow their traps from Team Rocket, and that they were invented by the R&D at their HQ.
And they always prove to be much better at whatever work they do for extra cash than they ever are at being bad guys. They'd probably have better lives if they just stopped chasing Pikachu.
They once tried to set up a memorabilia stand for some Pokemon tournament, and did well. Then they sank all of their money into it, just in time for the tournament to end and the market for their stuff to disappear.
In fact, Jessie recently started entering Pokémon contests; not only is she pretty good at it, she has won a few, even progressing quite far in the Sinnoh Grand Festival.
James also acts like pre-Flanderization Brock on occasion, showing potential to be a great Pokémon breeder.
Meowth, being able to speak both English and Pokémon language, also could be filthy rich if he stopped being a criminal and just became a translator.
In the Pikachu short film "Pokémon- Gotta Dance", Meowth is apparently a genius in that he invents a Pokébaton that can control Pokémon. However, he just uses it to make Pokémon dance, and he ends up allowing it to be destroyed.
"Just" the short? Meowth is a borderline Gadgeteer Genius; James mentioned that the cat's the one responsible for most of the Humongous Mecha that they throw at the twerps!
Subverted in Tsukihime canon; the 14th Dead Apostle Ancestor, Van-Fem, rather than drinking blood and harming humans, he took a preference to human society/life and built a highly-profitable casino boat in Monte Carlo shortly after World War 1 which earned him a high social status among humans.
Hideaki Anno is reported to have asked why Neo-Atlantis in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water wants to conquer the world instead of just using their superior technology for their own benefit. Reportedly, he got no answer. Wikipedia reports this, although the actual source seems unfindable.
Sunred points this out to his Friendly Enemy General Vamp in Tentai Senshi Sunred. Vamp is such a good homemaker that Sunred tells him, "You oughta give up the world domination thing and open a restaurant."
Inverted in One Piece, when minor villain Wapol actually starts a new life and builds a massive toy-making empire by using his powers to recycle objects into toys.
In fact, the alloy his power creates (dubbed "Wapometal") is apparently a unique and amazing compound, which makes him even richer when a scientist discovers its properties and Wapol begins capitalizing on that. Later in the series, Franky starts building tanks using the revolutionary metal.
Lampshaded in Coyote Ragtime Show when a swindler manages to sneak his way into a high-paying executive job for a major bank purely so he'll be in a position to test himself against their reputedly 'impenetrable' vault — he could easily have lived a comfortable and stable life with a job like that, but the money wasn't the issue.
Possibly lampshaded in Slayers NEXT. Martina is horribly, comically hopeless as a villain, but turns out to be sufficiently talented in retail and handicrafts to raise a small army of thugs out of her profits from selling (and making) paper flowers for a few episodes.
Averted in Baccano! when Nice (who qualifies as a villain only in the sense of being a criminal) invents a new form of explosive and immediately sells it to the mining industry.
The villains in Karakuridouji Ultimo have some truly unusual day jobs, including music composer, elementary school teacher, and pro golfer. It never seems to occur to them that they'd be better off using their incredibly powerful robot servants to pay the bills instead. The exception is K, who only joined the villains so he could quit his job and bum around all day. The manga constantly reminds us that he is unemployed.
Lampshaded in Durarara!! when Shuji wonders why the unnaturallysuperhuman Shizuo Heiwajima is slumming it in a rather low status and low-paying job as a debt collector/bodyguard when he could potentially use his abilities to become stupidly rich or famous. He gets his answer soon enough: Shizuo's so violently unstable that's it's only by virtue Ultimate Job Security that he has any job at all. A later Light Novel has Shinra pointing out that Shizuo's probably one of the few people that could consider supervillainry as his most viable career option, and the fact that he hasn't is a reason why Shinra usually gives him the benefit of the doubt when the situation looks bad ("Sorry. Nah, how would you ever bother to kidnap anyone? With your power it would be much faster to go to a bank and tear down the door of its vault if you wanted money.").
In Dragon Ball Z, Dr. Gero was capable of building machines that have infinite fuel. Given the world's demand for fuel, he could easily become the richest man in the world with this technology. Too bad he was only interested in getting revenge against Goku.
Comics — Books
In theory, any supervillain who uses expensive, fantastic technology for theft could subvert this: provided the technology is a one-time expense, they would eventually make back the money and start profiting if they manage to steal enough, meaning they can do it for the money andFor the Evulz. The problem is, in a world where superheroes are everywhere thwarting your every move, this isn't likely to happen.
The BritishDennis the Menace designs and builds an incredible Menace Car that can fly and hover and perform every trick imaginable — he could probably sell the technology for a billion pounds, but is satisfied to just "menace" the townspeople with it.
Many Superman comics, particularly the famous ElseworldsRed Son, allude to Lex Luthor likely making all kinds of amazing gadgets and discoveries... if he weren't so obsessed with killing Superman. Indeed, the Post Crisis refocusing of Lex from a Mad Scientist to a Corrupt Corporate Executive is due to this trope.
For those who have not read Red Son, Lex starts out a sociopath and his quest to defeat Superman's USSR almost leads the world to ruin, and leaves the USA a shattered country with states breaking from the unions, and a destroyed economy. When Luthor finally destroys Superman, he goes on to eliminate poverty, create a new economic system, and eliminate all diseases allowing humans to live for hundreds of years. The whole world is united as one nation under Luthor's banner and the golden age he engineers lasts for millions of years.
It is implied that this was planned all along, or at least from the point where he kills anyone with a working knowledge of his plans. His thoughts when he believes Superman has been killed. "One can almost be forgiven for thinking that this had all been worked out to the tenth decimal point forty years ago, eh?".
In Alex Ross' Justice, Lex Luthor makes this point as the Legion Of Doom turns to performing act of generosity - That superheroes only maintain the status quo. The supervillains use their power for good. Of course it's all a trick to allow Brainiac to take over the world.
In one Silver Age "imaginary story", Luthor goes as far as to ''invent a cure for cancer while in prison for the sole purpose of fooling Superman into believing he has gone straight. He later betrays Superman and murders him with Kryptonite rays.
One story begins with Lex having spent billions of dollars in plans against Superman for that month... and being glad that he's well within his budget. After his next plan to defeat Superman fails, Superman tells him that he's a brilliant man and could do so much for the world if he put his mind and resources to it instead of his hatred of him. Once Supes leaves, Lex, enraged at Superman's daring to tell him how to live his life, doubles his anti-Superman budget.
Lampshaded by Superman himself — in Infinite Crisis, Superman is drained of all his powers. They take a year to recharge, so for a year, no Superman at all. Upon his return, when he discovers that Lex has spent the year obsessing about him rather than doing anything useful, he taunts Lex about it. "Where's the cancer cure, Lex?"
It's much simpler in All-Star Superman — there, Lex is just so bitter and twisted towards Superman that he can't really be bothered doing anything that isn't related in some way to his vendetta. At the end, when he tries to accuse Superman of encouraging Holding Out for a Hero, Superman points out this trope to him: If Lex had truly ever wanted to save the world, he could have done it years ago.
The scheme in the Question miniseries comes to mind, where he builds a massive skyscraper which uses feng shui to kill any alien that gets too close to it with no warning. The Question discovers this and murders a bunch of Luthor's thugs and dumps them in the cement of the foundation, ruining the skyscraper's special properties but leaving it intact as a moneymaker for Luthor.
In Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, someone DOES just hire (the pre-Superman-rewrite) Lex Luthor as a consultant: One million dollars, for a five-minute session on how to destroy the seemingly invulnerable Swamp Thing. That really would be Lex's ideal career, eh? Being paid obscene amounts of money to figure out how to kill hard-to-kill-people.
"Believe me, gentlemen, you don't know from invulnerable."
See Jonathan Teatime in Hogfather, an assassin with precisely that hobby.
Subverted in Son of the Bat where the title character brings together Brainiac, Lex Luthor, and Ra's al'Ghul to save the world from being erased by time-travelers. It backfires horribly since the 3 of them only look out for their own individual interest despite any rewards promised.
The post-crisis Lex Luthor started his corporate empire by designing the Lex Wing airplane, an invention he claimed made him an aeronautical pioneer on the scale of John Glenn or Neil Armstrong.
From 2000-2004, Lex Luthor literally controlled Metropolis by upgrading it to Braniac technology and holding the access keys.
Subverted with the Justice League Unlimited version of Lex Luthor, who created a new city powered by a fusion reactor. However the fusion reactor was destroyed by Superman, who was tricked by Luthor into thinking it was a bomb so the public would fear and distrust Superman.
In the 2003 one-shot JLA: Welcome to the Working Week, Batman counters Weather Wizard's latest scheme by cutting him a check.
In the Justice League TV show, Batman pulls the same stunt by bribing the Ultra-Humanite to turn on his allies for a massive donation to public broadcasting so he can enjoy classical music tv programming in prison.
In the Rock of Ages story in JLA, Batman gave Mirror Master "a better offer" than Lex, effectively infiltrating the Injustice Squad. When Lex offers to double the JLA's price, Mirror Master says that it is not about the money. Batman explains that the money he paid Mirror Master went to the orphanage he grew up in, and advises never to underestimate a Scotsman's sentimentality.
In the Spider-Man/X-MenExpanded Universe novel Time's Arrow: The Present, Spidey muses on "the guys who spend six million dollars building robot suits so they can rob banks". He compares this with his own initial decision to make money as a masked wrestler/novelty act, rather than sell his webbing formula to an adhesives company, and concludes that it's not really about the money; it's about proving something to everyone who ever laughed at them.
The author of that book, Adam Troy-Castro, has fun with this trope; in the Sinister Six trilogy that he later wrote, he has Spidey sit down and have a little chat with a new minor villain rather than knock him all over the rooftops. He goes on to summarize the extended battle he had with the Six a few weeks earlier, as well as the abilities of the Sixers themselves. During the course of the discussion, he openly wonders why Electro doesn't just take a job with the electric company and earn millions that way.
In the first issue of The Hood, a friend of the Villain Protagonist spots Electro in a bar and speculates on the same question above. He points out that his friend would never last an hour at a straight job.
Back in the Steve Ditko days of Spider-Man, Spidey did try and sell his webbing formula to an adhesives company. The executives couldn't see a use for a powerful adhesive that lasted only 45 minutes.
This was a bit of a Shout Out to the real story behind the Post-It note. The Post-It glue was an accidental failure from research into far more powerful glues. Five years of soapboxing didn't convince the executives at 3M that they had a winner on their hands, and all in all it took close to ten years between the discovery of the glue and the first sales of Post-It notes.
Lampshaded in the modern Starman series, in which Jack Knight refuses to carry on the Starman legacy unless his dad will figure out how to adapt his "Cosmic Energy" technology to civilian purposes.
The Flash. The general inability/unwillingness of the classic Flash supervillains to think bigger has been noted quite a few times in that title. In the Final Crisis Rogue's mini-series, there is much ruminating on how when the Flash villains lose control of their tech, things much worse then hassling bank employees happen.
Doctor Alchemy somehow got his hands on the Philosopher's Stone — giving him the power to create infinite amounts of riches, transmute any substance to anything else, psychokinesis, and makes him immortal. He uses it, of all things, to commit petty crimes which repeatedly get him sent to jail. This is lampshaded extensively and hilariously in the opening narration of Manhunter #7.
In a variant, a biography about the Barry Allen Flash notes that the villain that most worried him was Weather Wizard, because he could use his weather control technology to create unlimited environmental destruction instead of just using it to commit relatively petty robberies.
This trope also ties into his origin story, wherein his dead brother intended to use the weather control technology for more wide-ranging altruistic (and potentially equally lucrative) purposes. It comes up again in the aforementioned JLA: Welcome to the Working Week, when he tries holding the East Coast hostage and is brought up short when Batman, before bringing out the carrot, points out how many people would be after him if he actually managed to carry out his threats.
Another example; Mirror Master is arguably the greatest inventor in the history of the world. He has created such devices as a matter duplicator, teleportation, and interdimensional portals. The first Mirror Master used these things to rob banks, the third uses them for mercenary work. If they just sold them they could become obscenely rich and not have to get the crap beaten out of them by a pajama-clad speedster.
The third Mirror Master actually ruminated on this once, that he and most of the people he ran with could become filthy rich beyond anything they could earn in petty crimes if they sold even half their individual tech, and that people had outright pointed this out to him before. He, however, concluded he LIKED running around being a supervillain far too much to really consider going legit.
In another story, a police detective who is forced to team up with Captain Cold calls him out for his criminal tendencies, pointing out how a man who invented a device that could manipulate matter on a molecular level (his "Cold Gun") would have had no problem getting rich legitimately. The Captain responds by pointing out the detective's preference for expensive suits despite their impracticality in his line of work. "We all have our vices."
In a Silver Age story, the Flash encounters the villain Element Master, whose gimmick is, well... the atomic elements. In the climax of the story, Element Master says he discovered a new element (the creatively dubbed "elemento") that is a sort of magnetic light, which he uses to send the Flash to the moon. Ignoring everything wrong with that idea, if it were true, Element Master would've completely changed the way we look at the elements, magnetism, Einstein's theory of relativity, and space travel, easily becoming the most important scientific figure in recent history. Instead... he tries to steal stores of "elements" like gold, platinum, and diamonds (carbon).
Eventually subverted by the first Icicle, Joar Mahkent. He went into villainy partly for the thrills, but he used his time in jail to work on his inventions and made a legitimate fortune once he reformed, half of which he left to the Flash.
How many tens of millions of dollars a year could Bullseye earn as a major league pitcher?
This was actually addressed; Bullseye did play baseball in High School, but was banned from the sport after murdering some dude with a particularly accurate pitch. This was where he also found his love of killing.
This is referenced in a Deadpool comic, where Bullseye mentions that he's never even used any of the money he's made as an assassin and thus may even be richer than Norman Osborn. He's a Psycho for Hire who's not in it for the money, but For the Evulz.
This is also the case with fellow Marvel villain and hired killer Boomerang. Boomerang started out as a highly skilled major league pitcher, who was blacklisted after taking bribes to throw games. Seeing his potential, the villainous organization known as the Secret Empire trained him and gave him his trademark killing weapons.
Plugging 330 IP and a 0.3 ERA into the Wins Above Replacement spreadsheet gave us a WAR of 22. The record for a single season was Babe Ruth, 1923, at 14.8 WAR. In 2010 a WAR was worth about 5.5 million, so he'll be "worth" 120 million. He'll probably "only" make 30-40 million (double the next ace)
Averted with the Marvel Comics character Taskmaster. Able to flawlessly imitate anyone's physical abilities after seeing them in action once, he initially made money and his reputation training flunkies for supervillains, teaching them how to take down their superhero opponents. Once it became known he was a mercenary, not merely a dedicated villain, legitimate governments and law enforcement started hiring him to teach their people on how to take down superpowered threats.
To the extent that, in his first appearance, he concludes that if he stayed and fought, he could probably defeat the entire Avengers team (and one of their more powerful line-ups at that). However, he sees no profit in it or point to fighting superheroes, and runs away instead.
In the Marvel comic Heroes for Hire, a mercenary named Paladin breaks into a special armory where the props and weapons of various former gimmick villains are stored, seeking valuable weapons to both arm himself with and to sell. He comes across the "alchemy gun" of the former supervillain Chemistro, and comments amusedly that "This guy invented a gun that could turn lead into gold, and all he could think of was to rob banks with it". Moments later, he had a lightbulb moment, saying "Waitaminute — this thing turns lead into gold... I'm good with just this!" and attempts to escape with it. Unfortunately, the gun is destroyed in the course of fighting his way out.
He presumably was unaware of the fact that any object transmuted by the alchemy gun turns into dust after exposure to heat or after a certain amount of time.
Well, Luke Cage would eventually comment that Chemistro was just one of those guys who had power and wanted to throw it around so people knew he meant business. If he turned things into gold and made himself rich, no-one would be afraid of him or know who was boss.
Chemistro's alchemy gun is in fact a subversion. In one issue of Iron Man, Curtis Carr tells Tony Stark that he has in fact tried to create new alchemy guns by attempting to duplicate the radiation field that gave his original gun its powers. As much as Carr might want to mass-produce his invention and get rich that way, so far he's had no luck.
In one Shazam story, Dr. Sivana is awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics because of all his useful inventions he discarded because he could not use them for crime, only to have Captain Marvel find them and bring them to the public. As it is, although Sivana could have earned a fortune if he could legally get patents on them, he is insulted by this turn of events, preferring to become Ruler of the Universe instead. He even goes so far that he promptly breaks jail to attempt to start World War III in retaliation with a ray that sparks violent aggression in people. Unfortunately, Captain Marvel interferes and turns the device into a peace ray that creates a solid 12 hours of world peace. As a result, Sivana is mortified at not only accepting his Nobel Prize under the ray's influence, but also for being subsequently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A version of this shows up in the Elseworld series Generations, in which Batman ends up taking over Ra's al Ghul's empire, and systematically dismantles the criminal operations while building up the legitimate front organizations into genuinely profitable and beneficial enterprises.
Superboy dumped the robot on the moon and Lex was taken to juvie (and later jail after he became of legal age). The reason Lex didn't use the technology again? He died in the 1930s when the Ultra-Humanite's rocket crashed. Ultra later performed a Grand Theft Me on Luthor's body which was fine, except for the deceased brain.
In the "Tarnished Angel" arc of Astro City, Steeljack talks to the widow of another small-time supervillain who had managed to steal enough money to be set for life if he'd just quit, laundered his loot, and kept his head down. Instead, he sank it into another criminal scheme and lost everything — another highlighting of the usual rationale for why Cutting Lex Luthor A Check doesn't work on some villains and thus isn't attempted more often.
Not just one other — Steeljack notes that this seems to the case for every small-time supervillain in the Kiefer Square area, including himself. Whenever they did manage to get any money, it would be squandered on more tech instead of put towards basic necessities, in the forlorn belief that they'd eventually strike it big.
In another Astro City story, The Junkman actually gets away with a massive bank robbery so clean that no one knows he did it. His pleasure is soon soured by ignorant civilians talking trash about him ("I'm sure the heroes caught the crook for something else"). He ends up deliberately recreating his robbery with intentional flaws, and ultimately getting himself caught, just for the recognition. He plans to sit through his trial, listening to the prosecutor reveal to the world just how great of a genius he is... then put his escape plan into action, thus getting everything he ever wanted.
Also averted with the villain Mock Turtle, who put his skills to creating Powered Armour for a company, only for them to forbid him from piloting it, so he snapped and stole it.
An episode of Justice League reveals that while Lex Luthor was on the run from the title league, he left LexCorp to his assistant Mercy... who subsequently dug it out of the imminent bankruptcy that he had driven it into with all of his anti-Superman schemes.
Something similar happened in the DCU comics continuity. Lana Lang has taken over bankrupt LexCorp and is despairing of a way to save the company from utter collapse... until she discovers that Lex had built himself a comfortable, reusable, and absolutely safe space shuttle so that he could go to the moon and back at will — solely to further his anti-Superman schemes, of course. Lex may have been too blinded to notice that he invented privatized spaceflight... but Lana isn't. She brings the technology to market and uses the profits to start digging LexCorp out of its financial hole.
Then when Lana goes to one of Luthor's moonbases, she points out to two employees that LexCorp wouldn't be on the verge of bankruptcy if Luthor didn't waste billions of dollars on moonbases built solely for the purpose of killing Superman.
Later, she discovered that Lex had hidden a clause in the fine print of her contract that if she ever used LexCorp assets to help Superman in any way, she was to be fired on the spot. And so she was.
And more specifically the clause told her that if she didn't vacate the premises immediately, she would be shot. For helping Superman.
In Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, Luthor has both build the Science Spire, a massive research facility / tribute to human ingenuity and bankrolled Hope, a new superhero who is actually an artificially-intelligent android completely unaware of her own artificiality. He ends up destroying both... for no better reason than to make Superman look bad.
An issue of Ultimate Spider-Man lampshaded and subverted this trope with Ultimate Shocker. Unlike the main universe version, the ultimate version is a real loser seen as a joke by everyone and constantly mocked by Spider-Man. However, after learning that Shocker had created his blasters himself, Spider-Man asked him why he didn't made a fortune with selling the technology. The subversion: Shocker reveals that he had worked for a big company creating inventions, and while said company made even more money, he was fired without seeing a single cent. Which also added a tragic aspect to the formerly laughable character, because he also explains how he studied at MIT until his eyes bled.
Similar to the Ultimate version of the Thinker, who turned to crime after he was fired from Roxxon for proposing alternative energy based on Vibranium.
The 616-Shocker is notable among Spidey villains in that he doesn't keep an irrational grudge against Spidey and keeps his eye on the prize, namely money. One time, when teaming up with the Trapster they got the upper hand and were just about to kill Spidey when they got a call from their employers saying that their payment would be doubled if Spidey lived. They decided to walk away (though Shocker did jokingly claim that killing him would "cut down his therapy bills")
None of that explains why 616 Shocker has never tied to use the technical skills he has to try and make money legitimately. Shocker doesn't seem that successful as a criminal and if he was smart enough to make his Shocker equipment, he could have made money as an engineer.
Averted in some Marvel comic or other. Molecule Man chats with another supervillain: "So eventually I got out of prison, and I thought?" "Now I shall have my revenge!" "No, no. Who needs the grief? With my powers I can live in luxury without ever doing anything to draw the heroes' attention."
Actually done by the villain Purple Man, who had pheromone-based mind-control powers. He lived the high life without doing anything to attract super-hero attention — only to get caught by Doctor Doom and used as a component in a world-conquest gizmo.
Lampshaded and played straight, one right after the other in Spider-Man. When the Man Who Would Be Hobgoblin first examines the Green Goblin's cache of equipment, he remarks on how incredible the technology is. Specifically, that the personal bat glider must surely represent a breakthrough in the field of aeronautics, and how this proves Norman Osborn's insanity, since he could have made far more money by patenting the design than he could ever have hoped to by using it for crime. In his very next breath, however, the man states that keeping such a thing to yourself would be one part of proving yourself better than those around you, and thus using it for personal gain makes total sense.
As for the Hobgoblin himself, while he certainly did use the Goblin gear and formula to make money with crime, that was a secondary objective, as he was already quite rich. The main reason he became the Hobgoblin was for the power; he had recently narrowly survived two attacks by a supervillain (he was saved by Spider-Man each time, irony of ironies) and wanted to feel secure. He couldn't have gotten that feeling by selling the glider and weaponry, and certainly not if he had revealed the secret of the superstrength formula.
In the first Spider-Man movie, Norman Osborn had designed the glider for the purpose of patenting it, so make of that what you will.
Well, he had specifically designed the super-serum and glider for the military (the source of their funding), but before taking the serum himself, he implies that he's also motivated For Science. After that, he's kind of insane and jealous at losing the funding, so yeah...
Another Osborn example comes from him actually curing cancer. Rather than sell it, the very first thing he does is weaponize it and use it against Deadpool.
As long as we're discussing Spider-Man villains, how about Mysterio? He's developed a wide variety of special effects and illusions that could probably have revolutionized the film industry, but crime gives him a chance to indulge the Large Ham tendencies that made him originally want to become an actor.
Though in the Animated Series form the 90s he was the effects guy. He just had a tendency to go overboard with things like explosions, which caused enough accidents for him to be fires.
The Vulture is another one of those subversions who started out making money honestly. It was only after he had been ripped off by his business partner that Adrian Toomes decided to use his new flying harness as a professional criminal.
Despite the Hobgoblin's opinion, Norman Osborn Zig-Zags this trope. The serum that gave him Super Strength and stamina also gave him Super Intelligence, and actually did turn him Ax Crazy- but in a Split Personality (-esque) sort of way, which doesn't really count. When he came Back from the Dead, Osborn regained a measure of his sanity, and used his intellect to go from a moderately successful businessman to a multi-millionaire industrialist and major crime lord. He later even buys the Hobgoblin out of his own company while the latter was trying to blackmail him. It's mentioned by Spiderman that he really could be using his brains for something more constructive- like curing cancer- but there is little sense that Osborns' goals of money and power weren't reached a long time ago.
At one point in Batman history, the Riddler realizes this wouldn't work on him in part because of his ego, and in part because he feels compelled to leave clues for Batman. He then performs a variant of this based on his compulsive disorder and rampant ego: he becomes a detective, to keep his ego inflated and potentially beat Batman at his own game, without having to worry about the inevitable Bat-Fist to the face and subsequent jail time should he fail.
At one point, the Riddler is seen chatting with Penguin, who has discovered he can make more money as a legitimate businessman selling cheaply made merchandise at extortionate, but legal, markups.
Penguin also hits this trope with the Iceberg Lounge. Criminal empires are fun, but Batman tends to kick your ass. Solution? Open a prestigious nightclub that doubles as a Bad Guy Bar for Batman's huge Rogues Gallery. It tends to get blown up a lot, but it provides a steady source of legal income.
Sort of occurred with the Batman villain the Mad Hatter. He used to use his mind controlling hats to commit crimes, feeling that the riches he made this way would make him happy. So did he realize that he could cut out the middleman and sell the technology for all the riches he wanted? No! He realized that he could use the hats on himself to become blissfully happy whenever he wants, thus cutting out two middlemen. He still commits crimes, but now it's just for fun.
In one Batman comic, where Batman was relating to one of the more recent Robins all of the death traps that he has foiled, Batman mentions a Haunted House of Death that the Scarecrow created to try and kill Batman. Robin states that Scarecrow would have made a fortune in the entertainment industry, making haunted houses for theme parks. Batman actually states that he recommended that to the Scarecrow after capturing him, but Scarecrow being Scarecrow, didn't listen.
In one Golden AgeBatman story, Catwoman establishes up a fashion magazine as part of plan to steal a fur coat. Think about what the investment versus return on that particular caper must have been. Just remember, the Catwoman — no matter her incarnation — isn't in the game for the profit; she's in it for the rush.
Another Golden AgeBatman story has a character named Carlos who had a phony mind-reading show, Bruce figured right away he was using code words to get the answers, gaining real mind-reading powers following a car accident and emergency brain surgery that "Fate slyly played its hand in". He does use his power to make money somewhat legally at first, in card games and radio shows, but decides to turn to crime so he can make even more money. He hits this trope head on when he learns Batman and Robin's real names, but can't think of anything better than to blackmail them into keeping away from him. It bites him on the ass when his last robbery victim fatally shoots him in the back while he's distracted fighting Batman.
There was another Golden AgeBatman story featuring a person with a photographic memory. Despite graduating from college with every degree possible, this guy couldn't get any work better than stage acts. He was recruited by mobsters so that he could memorize secret information without taking the relevant documents themselves and later sell said info, under the condition that the mobsters don't kill anyone during their jobs. The man's skills are proven when he forces Batman to fight dirty, renders him and Robin unconscious via nerve pinching, and perfectly copies the Batplane. Ultimately, since this story takes place during WWII, the story is subverted when Batman saves the man's life and recommends him to the army so his talents can be used against the Axis to atone for what he's done.
Victor Fries, or Mr Freeze, was originally an inexplicable cold-based villain, already falling under this trope. The guy has a gun that turns thermodynamics upside down and rather than patent that and claim his Nobel, he robs banks. The Animated Series established he was trying to save his frozen wife and committed crimes to get the necessary funds. He was a downright sympathetic anti-villain. He's also essentially ageless with a technology that could be invaluable to the rest of the world. Given he's not just in it For the Evulz, one's got to wonder why he doesn't just go legit, prove what he's done, and wait for university and corporate backers to line up just for a chance to throw resources at him.
One comic suggested that, while he is not in it For the Evulz, he's also not willing to part with any of his inventions (with the occasional case-by-case exception) until Nora is all fixed.
Subverted with the villain 8-Ball, who actually started out working for a defense firm as an engineer, before he was fired when his employers thought he was selling company secrets to pay his large gambling debts, leading him to create his weapons and costumed identity.
Later played straight with Spectra, who first got a job in a laboratory so she could rob the place, only to obtain superhuman powers after Sleepwalker interferes in the robbery. At first, she seems poised to become a criminal, but when she reappears it turns out she's gotten a legitimate job using her light-generating powers.
One of his first villains was Crimewave, who wanted to, among other things, kidnap models and hold the valuable clothes they were wearing hostage...using his remote-controlled, armored van with a tentacles-and-guns self-defense system. This is justified, as the bad guy cares more about fame—he even has his own cameraman—than actually making a profit or toppling Kingpin.
Justified as far back as the 1960s by the Porcupine, an Ant-Man villain. The inventor of the Porcupine battle suit worked for the American Department of Defense, and thought that the U.S. government would pay him next to nothing for the armor (due to it being pretty goofy looking), and so he decided to keep it for himself. On the other hand, given that he turned out to be such a sorry excuse for a supervillain, he probably should have kept his day job, since at least then he'd have had a steady income.
Inverted during X-Factor's first run in with Random — Havok realizes that Random is fighting his team to a standstill because someone hired him. Havok ends the fight by literally cutting Random a check to buy out his contract.
Subverted by the X-Men villain Arcade, who creates deadly Death Traps involving highly advanced robotics, that he uses to try and kill his victims. Given that he's already enormously wealthy, Arcade doesn't really need the $1 million he charges for his deadly theme parks — it's all just a game to him. Another subversion comes when he finds another market for his inventions, using his "Murderworlds" as training grounds for supervillains who want to get some practice in before going up against the heroes.
Well, he does need the $1 million, but that's mostly to cover the cost of maintaining the theme parks.
Lampshaded by the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird when Baxter Stockman, already very wealthy from his legitimate technology company, begins using his Mouser robots for crime. When April asks him why he'd do it when he's already rich, Stockman, who is already mentally unhinged to begin with, simply claims that it's fun! The 2003 cartoon repeats this scene, although this more sane version of Stockman is simply a greedy bastard, chiding April for being naive when he could have even more money than he already had by robbing banks and leasing his technology to the Shredder in addition to his legitimate business. Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too?
In Mark Evanier's Blackhawk run, American scientist Professor Merson worked for the Nazis, creating wonders such as the Worm, the War Wheel, and even five duplicates of Adolf Hitler. The Blackhawks captured Merson several times, but he would usually be freed somehow and return to the Nazis... until Winston Churchill cut him a bigger check to work for the Allies.
An evil engineer called the Tinkerer, first introduced in the Spider-Man comics, would construct supervillains' gear either from his own original ideas or from designs they submitted him, presumably because they lacked the resources to make the equipment themselves. The Tinkerer was also noteworthy in that he had several options for customers to pay him back, either providing the entire sum up front, or setting up a payment plan with regular installments in case the villain didn't have the money right off the bat.
Ares Buchanan, upon discovering that another criminal had managed to get a rejected android from S.T.A.R. Labs due to a scientist with personal problems who needed the money, began raiding the labs for rejected weapons. Although these weapons had safety and long-term reliability issues, Buchanan banked on these not deterring less warranty-conscious criminal customers, who could not sue. Again, this prevented the problem.
Similarly, Punch and Jewelee later go explained as having raided S.T.A.R. Labs, not having built their own weapons.
This is a very, very, very common origin for DC tech-villains. So many villains do this that one wonders whether or not S.T.A.R. Labs' security is on the take.
Marvel's Roxxon Corporation in the 1970's did it on purpose to get their gear field-tested.
Both the Fixer and Ani-Mator had worked as legitimate scientists. The Fixer was fired from a number of jobs because of his air of superiority and unorthodox approach to simple tasks. Seeking a challenge, he turned to the planning and execution of technologically assisted crimes. The Ani-Mator similarly often wandered off to pursue his own interests.
Doctor Lovecraft in the Justice League initially did legitimate work for his company, but when they pursued financial wrongdoing, they allowed him to pursue more dangerous experiments to create mutates to steal for the company. As these mutates later devolved out of sentience, this explains why he could not have gone public with his results.
The Revenant has managed to "convince" a number of villains of the PS238 universe that it is better for them to find a more practical way to use their abilities. For example, Mr. Godwin, a.k.a. the Crystal Skull, was convinced to stop robbing banks and to take money from people voluntarily... by running a legit casino.
Ezekiel Stane developed... cybernetic enhancements, an artificial healing factor, and a biological power source strong enough to match Iron Man. Because... because he wanted to kill Iron Man. Obviously the prosthetics industry, biomedical engineering industry, and medical science will just have to fucking wait! Genius can't be rushed!
Stane seemed to be more interested in personal vendetta than profit. There was also a philosophical aspect to it; Stane believed himself to be the new wave of technology with Tony being outdated.
Iron Man once defeated a villain called the Living Laser. An alternate universe comic has him simply hiring the certified genius as Tony Stark. Unfortunately, this doesn't work because like most villains, he doesn't fit into society. This is arguably the best reason for not cutting Lex a check... villains who don't fit in still don't with money.
Marvel eventually explained that many of Iron Man's adversaries with inexplicable new technology were in fact hired and equipped by long-term villain Justin Hammer.
Subverted as far back as the 1960s by the Wizard, an enemy of the Fantastic Four. He'd already become extremely wealthy with his incredible scientific talents, but he'd become intellectually bored and craved new challenges. Naturally enough, this led to him taking on the the Human Torch, and then the Four as a collective nemesis, becoming an Evil Counterpart to Reed Richards and forming an entire Evil Counterpart team in the Frightful Four.
However Wizard's henchman the Trapster follows this trope to a T. He invented a type of super adhesive and decided to use it to rob banks instead of just patenting it, for some reason that they never explained. He even got a pardon after his first criminal outing, by helping the Avengers defeat Baron Zemo and yet still went back crime after that.
The guy initially went around calling himself Paste-Pot Pete. Making sensible career moves clearly isn't his area. He's also sufficiently bad at his job that he was once defeated by the automated defenses of the Baxter Building when the FF weren't home.
To be fair, the automated defenses of the Baxter Building are ridiculously powerful. Then again, given that the main person they're intended to try and slow down is Doctor Doom, they need to be.
And exactly which defense eventually neutralized him? The receptionist. Granted, this was a Reed Richards made robot receptionist, but if you're stuck in the Vault discussing how you got arrested and Venom asks you "Who took you down?" you do NOT want your answer to be "The Fantastic Four's receptionist."
Another very early issue of the Fantastic Four had an inverted invocation of this trope: the villain in this case was a stage magician who used his skills as a hypnotist and illusionist to fool the Fantastic Four into thinking he had powers far greater than theirs. Then he used these powers to fight them off as he went around stealing jewelry.
Reed Richards ultimately deduced that his powers were phony by pointing out that if he really were such a powerful magician, he could easily have eliminated them all.
Then he went on to point out that if those powers were real the magician could easily have conjured up all the jewels and treasure he wanted without having to stoop to such petty thievery in the first place.
Aside from these very good points, any reader might also have expected any villain as powerful as the magician was pretending to be would have somewhat higher aspirations than theft. Doctor Doom, rich and powerful dictator that he was, also tried to steal some jewels and treasure in an early Fantastic Four comic, but only because they were from the famous pirate Blackbeard's hoard and he believed them to have some kind of magical power above and beyond their monetary value.
Linkara points out in the Agony Booth review of Batman #147, that the scientist Garth could have patented an age-reversing ray instead of working with jewel thieves.
Averted with The Atom's foe the Bug-Eyed Bandit, who became a criminal because no one would buy his technology — no-one would fund his research without a working model of it, but he couldn't build a working model of it without funding. Eventually, he got so ticked off that he just stole the money he needed, built his tech at last and used it to become a career criminal.
This is Linkara's issue with Amanda Gideon, the villain of the short-lived Marvel comic Nightcat. The woman is the head of a media empire and already practically owns the city...and yet she's also the head of an illegal drug ring and has a Mad Scientist conducting beyond-questionable animal experimentation. Even beyond this trope, her downfall is entirely her own fault, since those illegal endeavors gave the title character the motive and means to go after Gideon.
He also called the one-shot Daredevil villain "The Surgeon General" on her whole organ-stealing shtick, which inherently relies on being a skilled surgeon.
On the other hand, selling black-market organs would probably be more profitable than the average medical practice... the savings on malpractice insurance alone would be immense.
Averted in one Tom Strong storyline; an alternate-timeline version of Tom manages to stop his archenemy in the normal timeline from ever turning to crime by pointing out how much more money he could make by selling his inventions legitimately.
The Authority tends to do this in varied ways. "Tank Man" is simply talked into giving up his murderous ways and settling down (it doesn't turn out well, but they tried). Jacob Krigstien is given an outlet for his world-changing habits by being allowed to do it in a non-killing-people way. An animal-abusing psychopath is put on retainer for when the Authority needs to get information out of human-abusing psychopaths.
In the "Authority: Revolution" maxi-series, villain Henry Bendix makes a fortune by having fast-food restaurants use their excess grease to start up alternative fuel stations.
The Authority's spiritual predecessors from Stormwatch, The Changers, were a group of superhumans who sought to improve the world rather than just maintain the status quo. Their intended actions (much like the Authority) included using nanotechnology to provide unlimited food and medicine, educating the world about using unknown natural resources and executing corrupt leaders and other monsters beyond any redemption. Their villainous status is deliberately ambiguous; while they did attempt to force their changes on the world without giving people any choice in the matter, almost every member of Stormwatch at least empathised with the situation or wanted to work with them; they were destroyed because Stormwatch's ax-crazy commander only wanted change on his own terms and commandeered orbital weaponry to take them out.
Hilariously subverted in the short-lived DC parody comic book the Inferior Five. The would-be superteam's first nemesis was Dr. Gregory Gruesome, a brilliant, evil Mad Scientist who was so poor he lived in a dilapidated wooden hut in the middle of a junkyard and his sole henchman was a dim-witted vagabond. Despite lamenting about his inability to "turn out multi-million-dollar missiles like they were paper planes" like this trope's namesake, he actually created some remarkably effective machines by cobbling together garbage, scrap, and various other odds and ends.
Lampshaded in one Robin issue where he's beating up the Trickster. He points out to him that he has shoes that can walk on air, and by mass producing them, he'd be ten times richer than Bruce Wayne. Instead, he rents himself out as a mercenary.
In an earlier issue of Blue Devil, the first Trickster is also asked why he didn't market his shoes. He points out they've just finished a storyline in which he tried to do that and the buyers tried to A) kill him and B) forcibly secede California, though he does consider trying to resell to a "reputable" organization like SKULL. Also, Depending on the Writer, he may have been more interested in the attention than the money.
In Shadow of the Bat, there was this one Batman villain named the Human Flea who invented a device allowing him to jump extraordinarily high. The Human Flea went around robbing diners to save his father from going bankrupt. After capturing the Human Flea, Batman tells the supervillain that he could make himself rich off patenting his invention. The Human Flea responds that he never thought of that.
The Flash villain the Chunk gave up supervillainy and used his suction powers (being able to siphon off material to another universe inside his own body) to start a personal removal business.
This is ultimately what solves the Great Deadpool Vs. Bullseye fight in the most recent Deadpool series. Bullseye, who has realized that he simply can't beat Wade, reveals that Norman Osborn wants to buy him off. The twist comes in where it's actually Bullseye's money, as he kills mainly for pleasure and essentially stockpiles his earnings, making him astonishingly wealthy — he never buys anything.
It isn't the first time someone's opted for this approach with him. during Gambit's first on-going he also writes Deadpool a check rather than fighting him. Funny thing was during "The Assassination Game", Gambit's powers are turned up to eleven, he can charge living tissue and on a line of sight basis.
One of the Bananaman comics in The Dandy had this with a villain (well, his villainy was basically trying to scare the hero), running a fancy fake haunted house with holographic ghosts and what not. It subverted the trope because at the end, the villain DID do a Heel Face Turn and use his abilities to run a theme park Haunted House ride.
The Circus of Crime may be D-list villains, but they're excellent circus performers. If they would go straight and abandon the "hypnotize the crowd and rob them blind" shtick, they could pull in plenty of money without getting beat up and thrown in jail.
At least one comic had them propose doing that... then lament that it wouldn't really be all that profitable, since not too many people care about the circus anymore.
In Common Grounds, Big Money recalls the time he saved all of creation by writing a supervillain a 27 million dollar check so he wouldn't destroy the universe. The talk show host interviewing him is a little shocked; that's a lot of money, after all, even for a billionaire, but Big Money notes that he wouldn't have been able to use it if the guy had gone through with his plan.
Incredible Hulk villain The Leader. The man has invented things Mr. Fantastic and Dr Doom can't even dream of. He even invented a machine that can revive the dead; surely he could make billions with that alone. Except the Leader's goal is to Take Over the World, not get rich, so he does have a reason why he is a villain.
In Modesty Blaise, one character says that to some people, making money through illegal means is a feeling similar to a sexual rush.
During Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, this one company got the Floronic Man paroled in order for the villain to help them understand how the Swamp Thing serum worked. However, the owner of the company wasn't pleased with the Floronic Man's explanation (it didn't; something else happened). In return, the Floronic Man arranged things so that the owner would be killed by a (justifiably) enraged Swamp Thing.
Subverted with the Ultimate Marvel version of Dr. Octopus. The reason behind the clashes between Dr. Octopus and Spider-Man was so that the villain could collect DNA samples from Spidey with hopes of cloning Spidey and winning the Nobel Prize. Upon arrest, Dr. Octopus made a deal with the FBI to produce Spider-Man clones for the agency.
Amongst the many corrupt businesses owned (and reformed) by the Agents of Atlas was a theater troupe/cult who performed a musical which was actually a summoning ritual. After defeating them, they noticed that the show was pulling in decent money.
From the spin-off Gorilla Man:
Evil Minion: I am loyal to the family Borgia! Gorilla Man: Here! Come work for Atlas, we'll pay the same plus this signing bonus. Actually Not That Evil Minion: Grazi. Where would you like me to throw this jar?
G.I. Joe's arch-nemesis Cobra has developed a highly-efficient hydrogen fuel source which would make them billions if they used it to solve the energy crisis. But according to Baroness, they can make trillions by withholding the technology instead.
Can somebody please explain how they make more money withholding the technology rather than releasing it?
Perhaps the hydrogen-fuel source is so powerful and cost-effective that it would only bring them "billions" Furthermore, anti-trust legislation would eventually dissolve Cobra's monopoly on the hydrogen fuel cell market. Therefore, Cobra probably makes trillions by taking in bribes from petroleum companies and governments of oil-rich areas not to release the technology.
Cobra also bribes major political/economic leaders with cloned organ transplants. However, Cobra could make far more money selling the technology than using it to bribe leaders.
Then again Corba veiws itself as a New World Order and wants to destory the system in replace it with itself.
The Adventures of Tintin has a subversion in Flight 714. Dr. Krollspell has developed a working, if unperfected, truth serum. Now, you might reasonably assume that every intelligence or security agency in the world would pay a king's ransom for it. However, instead of marketing it, Dr. Krollspell takes a job from Rastapopoulos to use it on millionaire Laszlo Carreidas to get a bank account number. This trope could even conceivably apply to Rastapopoulos too. He could have bankrolled the distribution of a massive invention... except that the truth serum doesn't work, as Carreidas ends up babbling on about everything except the bank account number. Rastapopoulos could have injected Carreidas with Rajaijah Juice and gotten the same result.
A current subversion is in the IDW Comics incarnation of GI Joe, where Dr. Mindbender has played a major role in scientific discoveries throughout the 20th century, including the development of the A-Bomb and other anonymous discoveries (one of them suggested to be the implementation of the polio vaccine).
A couple of examples can be found in the earliest Stan Lee-scripted stories of The Mighty Thor. One Mad Scientist essentially discovered how to create matter out of nothing with a device that created a perfect duplicate of whatever it was pointed at. Having outdone everyone from Einstein to Galileo to Reed Richards in terms of scientific achievement, the scientist uses the device to create an Evil Twin of Thor and sends him after the real one.
And then there's Mister Hyde, an evil Genius Bruiser who started out as an enemy of Thor before becoming a Rogues Gallery Transplant. In his second appearance, he's shown using a "Time Reversal Ray", which shows events that occurred in the past of its target. Although such a device could be used for anything from police investigations to historical research, Hyde merely uses it to indulge a petty grudge against Thor. Oy vey...
Mr. Hyde is an Ax CrazyPsycho for Hire and a Complete Monster; his goal is not making money, it's making others suffer for his own amusement, so its not surprising he would use said device for revenge.
MAD once had a article that said that your laziness factor factored in the amount of work you're willing to go through to get out of doing work.
In the Marvel 2099 universe, Doom 2099 wanted to conquer America because the American corporate structure deemed many of Doom's technological advances to be profit losses (for example, there was deemed to be more money in selling anti-pollution pharmaceuticals as opposed to cleaning up the atmosphere).
Spider-Man again. Aunt May is kidnapped by Norman Osborn so as to force Spider-Man to help him break out. Spidey learns that much of the superhero-villain problem is funded by big business so as to keep the good guys from really changing society, namely by realising that the leaders of these businesses are themselves monumental bastards who parastitically feast on societies ills. They hired Osborn and other inventors to provide gadgets and resources to various C-list villains to keep Spider-Man and other heroes occupied- until he went nuts and became the Green Goblin, anyway. When Osborn was- finally- incarcerated for his crimes, they sent a Brainwashed and Crazy Doctor Octopus to take him out before he started cutting deals to expose the whole conspiracy.
The Spider-Man villain the Spot has black spots that are essentially portable holes, which he can affix to anything (including thin air) and which can transport anyone entering them through Another Dimension and across seemingly any distance. The sadly now-defunct website "The Villains of Marvel Comics!" once listed eight better things than supervillainy he could have used such a power for. The ideas were all themselves pretty frivolous for such a monumental invention (e.g., smuggling contraband and helping college students cheat on exams), but they would all have been way more profitable (and way less dangerous) than fighting Spider-Man.
The Marvel Comics villain the Answer has a power described thusly: "the ability to develop any power needed in a certain situation." Let me run that by you again: he has the power to do anything he needs to do in order to accomplish a set goal. And what does he use this power for? Working as an Elite Mook for HYDRA, the Kingpin, and the Hood. That's right: not only is he using a Game Breaker power to commit crimes, but he's not even his own boss.
Minor-league Marvel Comics supervillain The Ringer thoroughly subverts this trope. He actually started out working as a legitimate engineer for NASA, but he got a serious case of Green-Eyed Monster syndrome when he saw wealthy business executives like Kyle Richmond getting rich off the hard work of people like him. The Ringer originally embarked on his career to get revenge for the little guy by robbing Kyle Richmond, who was secretly the superhero Nighthawk.
After Nighthawk defeated him and he escaped from jail, the Ringer tried again with an upgraded battlesuit that allowed him to gather condensed air particulates and assemble them into a substance that was almost as strong as steel and that he could use to make additional rings whenever he needed them. Despite the fact that this invention could probably have revolutionized the steel industry, to say nothing of manufacturing in general, the Ringer simply uses it to...try and market the battlesuit to his criminal contacts, but then the Beetle forces him to fight Spider-Man and he gets his ass kicked.
The Mark Millar run on Spider-man offers an alternate theory: Norman Osbourne tells Spidey that when the first super-heroes started appearing, a collection of business interests and government officials, all of who having personal reasons for making sure that Status Quo is God to ensure that these heroes would never upset their position as the ruling class... As Norman puts it, they don't want Hank Pym running the Federal Reserve. The most public of their plans was the creation of numerous super-villains, not just to distract the heroes, but to ensure that there will just so happen to be an EMP attack the Baxter Building should Richards get close to coming up with a cheap renewable energy source or the like...
In All Fall Down, the genius supervillain IQ lives in squalor, while his equally-brilliant son (a legitimate businessman) is worth billions.
Comics — Newspaper
FoxTrot has Jason Fox, who tries several ludicrous schemes to make money, (including thousand-dollar SNOW DINOSAURS, which, you know, would MELT come Spring!) despite the fact that he has effortlessly built machines and coded programs that could have made him MILLIONS had he simply sold them.
He once tried to form a one-man corporation, but all he had to show investors was "a dinky little program I wrote for fun." Unfortunately for him and them, the Darth Jason virus did not "kill off interest," it "killed off the Internet."
Possibly justified in that, while genius at some things, Jason is still a child and thus doesn't always have the best common sense.
Averted with Wildstorm Universe villain Kaizen Gammora who sells battle-droids and pleasure robots to finance his country's terrorism.
Fan Works
Justified to a great extent in issue #16 of Ultimate Spider-Woman: Change With the Light, when the Beetle provides a number of rebuttals to the arguments that supervillains should just patent their technology. Even if you can patent your technology, there's always the danger that some Corrupt Corporate Executive will try and screw you out of your share of the profits, something the Beetle claims happened to the Shocker when he tried selling his shock blasters to Justin Hammer. Starting your own business is no guarantee of success either, particularly when many businesses fail within their first year of operation. Then there's the fact that many supervillains do not want to spend their time working for people they view as Pointy Haired Bosses who got ahead through asskissing and brownnosing, rather than actual talent. This obviously isn't the case most of the time, but supervillains as a whole tend to be misanthropes...
The deconstruction of this trope is further explored with Jack O'Lantern and his ultimate goal to create the Tomorrow Legion, an organization of supervillains who essentially form their own voluntary criminal syndicate to coordinate their efforts. It's heavily implied that one of the major reasons supervillains act the way they do is specifically so they can cause mayhem with their powers, along with making some fast money in the bargain. In a bizarre, perverse way, most supervillains actually find cruelty, sadism and murder to ultimately be more meaningful and rewarding than using their powers for honest work.
Films — Animation
Inverted in The Incredibles. Syndrome states that he made a fortune for himself by designing weapons and selling them, and that his real motivation for supervillainy was glory and revenge on Mr. Incredible. Except he seeks his glory by manufacturing a threat so he can pretend to save the day. The final phase of his plan was to sell all the gadgets he saved for his superhero persona once he'd had his fun, thus making "natural" superheroes obsolete.
The villain of Up, Charles F. Muntz wants to get fame and recognition by catching a rare bird. To accomplish this he invents devices that allow dogs to communicate verbally, and fly airplanes! Even if he wanted fame and renown rather than money, being known as the person who invented the device that lets dogs talk to humans would be far more likely to make him famous than catching a new species of bird! Heck considering the dogs don't even need to bark to speak with this, the profits from engineering it to allow mute humans and humans who are completely paralyzed to speak would ensure his honor among the greats. This is, however, justified and lampshaded to some extent by showing that he has become psychotically obsessed with the bird.
Not to mention that his museum is full of dozens of skeletons of other species, all of them of a bizarre nature and undiscovered to science. Had he brought any of those back instead, he would have made far more of a profit in the scientific realm than the capture of a single colorful ostrich.
In the animated film Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, Lex Luthor's Presidential Administration rejuvenates the American economy. However, Lex Luthor eventually decides it is his destiny to have the Kryptonite meteor devastate Earth. This is likely due to him shooting up with kryptonite steroids and going completely insane.
Films — Live-Action
Invoked in Big Fish. Norther Winslow tries to make it big as a professional thief, but it doesn't work out because Texas oil speculation has bankrupted the bank that he tries to rob. His response?
"I should go to Wall Street. That's where all the money is."
A heroic version in the Disney live action George of the Jungle movie. Two poachers try to kidnap the talking ape to drag to Vegas for the greatest show in the world. But after their plans are foiled, Ape shows up onstage in a Vegas show anyway, quite visibly eager to be a star. Instead of tranquilizer darts and cages, they should have tried contracts and business lunches.
Subverted in the first film, when Number Two grows furious with Dr. Evil for engaging in world-threatening schemes when their front companies were already making billions a year legally.
In Goldmember, Number Two finally hit upon the brilliant scheme of making the organization a legitimate business with the ethics of an evil organization, by turning it into a talent agency.
In the Woody Allen flick Small Time Crooks, his character wants to use a bakery as a cover for digging a tunnel from its basement to a bank. The bank robbery fails, but they make millions with the cookies and pursue that, instead.
Subverted in the first Spy Kids movie, where Mad Scientist Fegan Floop has to be goaded by his henchman Minion actually the real Big Bad into finishing his plan: using his successful Boobah-esque children's show as a cover to kidnap and hypnotize the kids of VIPs. As Floop finds his show quite rewarding on its own, he seems to have lost sight of his actually Minion's goals:
Minion: It's time for the most evil part of our plan! Floop: Syndication?
Perhaps having three extra faces molded to his head humbled him enough? He also appeared to use the extra mouths to sing barbershop quartets with himself, so he could also have found a better calling than villainy.
In Lord of War, Yuri Orlov eventually abandons his business as an arms dealer and adopts, in his words, "more legal methods of exploiting Third World countries", but notes that it isn't as thrilling as his old line of work, and there is comparatively more competition. He inevitably returns to arms dealing, with the change that it is government sponsored.
In Buckaroo Banzai, alien infiltrator John Bigboote has turned the front company Yoyodyne into a major defense contractor, so is less than enthusiastic when the Big Bad John Whorfin insists on building an interdimensional spacecraft to mount a attack on their original homeworld Planet Ten.
The Corrupt Corporate Executive in TRON made his name, position and fortune by stealing another programmer's game programs... with the help of his fully sentient A.I. It's explained that the executive's A.I. started out as little more than a chess program that could learn, but you'd expect that a learning program would still be a tad more complex than a video game.
Ever see a computer program trying to make a work of art? Not everyone can make a videogame, even a computer.
Dr. Octopus is researching a new power source. In order to control it, he invents a system of mechanical arms that interface with his brain, have artificial intelligence, are indestructible, have the strength to throw cars, and never seem to need new batteries. Just about every aspect of the things would seem to merit a Nobel Prize, but Octavius and the rest of the world initially only treat them as a simple tool. However, if he research in nuclear fusion had paid off, it would have been a significantly more important discovery.
And in Spider-Man 3 Sandman needs to raise money for his sick daughter and turns to a life of crime. When he becomes living sand, you'd think he could strike a deal to work off his debt to society for a little government health care. It's not like a guy who can meld with sand wouldn't come in handy in any ongoing warzones. Instead, he simply robs banks. In all fairness, however, Sandman is simply doing what comes naturally to him and has no reason to suspect that anyone would allow him to go straight.
The Avengers (1998). Sir August could have legally made billions of dollars just by selling his weather control services to the other governments of the world. Possibly justified because he's insane and wanted revenge on the British government for firing him.
The Riddler in Batman Forever actually does make a neat sum from selling his invention, but then he blows it on an elaborate Bat-trap. Which was the sole reason he amassed a fortune in the first place.
Comes up in the recent Sherlock Holmes movie with the villain's chemical weapon in a way that shows why he is a Smug Snake, while Irene Adler's mysterious employer Moriarty is a Magnificent Bastard. While the villain has your standard Take Over the World plot and plans to kill everyone in Parliament with the bomb and declare himself king, Adler's employer actually isn't interested in the bomb itself, but rather the very sophisticated detonator which prefigures television remotes and other wireless technology by several decades. The villain was completely oblivious to the idea of the device as a means for anything but Card-Carrying Villainy.
Iron Man 2: Tony Stark invokes this trope when talking to Whiplash after the latter's attempt to kill him: the very first thing Tony does (after critiquing his opponent's design) is ask him why he used his device for murder instead of selling the design to the highest bidder. Hammer offers to cut him a check, but trying to make a profit was what got Vanko's father banished back to Russia, so Vanko himself is interested only in revenge.
In Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, Godfrey conspires with the King of France to undermine England from the inside. However, Godfrey is best buddies with King John of England, who quickly promotes him to his second-in-command. Godfrey is already more powerful than Philip would ever make him, yet he follows through with the betrayal.
Inverted in Octopussy. Octopussy informs James Bond that while, yes, they're thieves and spies, they've diversified into a wide range of legitimate businesses.
Reuben in the remade Ocean's Eleven. After Benedict ran his casino out of business, he completely bankrolls Danny's heist to the tune of about $17 million rather than just try to build another casino. This one becomes subverted, however, as the successful heist allows him to be completely reimbursed and actually make a $13 million profit.
Inverted in the Halloween remakes. While the original movies had Dr. Loomis spend twenty years tracking Michael Myers in an attempt to stop him from murdering people (to the point where it drove the good doctor insane and left him horribly disfigured), the remakes explored what would have happened if Loomis had just used his status as Myers' psychiatrist to write a best-selling book, become famous, and make lots and lots of money. Incidentally, the money and fame turned him into a self-centered Jerk Ass and he soon met his demise.
In the Resident Evil movies, Umbrella could have made billions off of selling AI, Genetic Engineering or Human Clones. Just read the specifics here.
In The Prestige, Nicolas Tesla tries to invent a teleportation machine for Robert Angier to use in his magic shows. The problem was, the machine ended up copying things instead of teleporting them. But Angier still used the machine to perform his magic trick, creating copies of himself so that it appeared as though he was teleporting across long distances. Angiers could become the richest man in the world almost overnight by copying valuable objects with the machine, but he's already a wealthy gentlemen who is more interested in magic than riches. He could also do things like completely end world hunger by copying food and so forth, but his obsession to out-do his magical rival blinds him to all other goals.
In Night at the Museum, the Tablet of Akmenrah is an ancient Egyptian artifact at the Museum of Natural History which grants life to all of the exhibits during the night [...] With the power of resurrection in his hands, Stiller harnesses the magic of the Vampire Tablet to...hang around and talk to the exhibits? [...] Seeing as the Tablet also endows the resurrected exhibits with the personality and memories of the person depicted, it could solve pretty much all of the mysteries of history. Oh, and there's the minor point of being able to resurrect all of the planet's greatest geniuses and putting them to work on today's problems. What about a statue of Jesus? Would it be able to tell us if there's a God? Stiller's misuse shines even brighter when you consider that the Tablet apparently lets you "walk into" any painting you want, also making it a Time Machine/Teleporter. The possibilities with such a set up are literally endless.
This can be explained very simply; he likes the job, he's an honest man, and it's not his Tablet. The older guards are not so scrupulous, and attempt to steal the tablet and blame it on Stiller's character. It also happens to grant them youthful vigor. Larry does try to show it to his love interest, but she thinks he's mocking her. Then he shows his son.
In the second film, Larry has become rich off of inventions inspired by his time as a guard, and he uses the tablet to save the museum by making everyone believe the living exhibits are the new holograms they were going to replace the exhibits with.
A magical controller given to Adam Sandler in Click by the Angel of Death himself, Christopher Walken (playing Christopher Walken), the Universal Remote grants you power over the very fabric of the universe. The user is free to manipulate matter and time via typical remote options, like fast forwarding, muting or presumably anything a typical remote can do. [...] Sandler uses the remote to fast-forward his life when he gets bored. [...] You know what? Screw the remote. We want to use it as an excuse to strike up a chat with Angel Walken. Once again the main character has a link to the afterlife and he uses it for what? To get his life back on track? You self-centered ass. You couldn't spare one minute to talk to Death himself and get answers to questions that have plagued humanity for centuries? As for the remote itself, hell the language switching feature enough seems to act as a universal translator. That alone would be pretty damned useful.
Disney's Snow White And The Seven Dwarves equivalent to Google, the Queen's magic mirror was a powerful artifact which housed a spirit who could answer any question, locate any person and, if we understood its nature properly, narrate any erotic novel it was asked about. Holy hell, it really was Google. [...] Throughout the movie the only question the Queen offers the all-knowing mirror is whether she is pretty, reducing the powerful demon to the medieval equivalent of Hot or Not? [...] Who knows where the boundaries of the mirror end. Does it possess technological knowledge? What if we asked it about the recipe for the cure for cancer, time travel or an immortality pill? Thanks to the Queen's egocentrism we will never know.
In the film version of Street Fighter M. Bison is the dictator of some tiny southeastern Asian country, but somehow has developed both super-soldier biochemical engineering, as well as hover boots, with which he wants to use to conquer the world. He could probably become the de facto ruler of the world just by marketing those two bits of technology.
In Clockstoppers, the hypertime watch is a device which speeds up the molecules of your body to the point where the world around you seems to be standing still. Terminator's Kyle Reese plans to use it to usurp the U.S. government. For some reason, Jesse Bradford and that chick from Harold & Kumar think that's a bad thing and try to stop him. Not by using the watch. No, that's reserved for important things, like helping a friend win a DJ competition. How about strapping the watch to the fastest rocket we can come up with and achieve faster than light travel? It'd work, right? The molecules of the ship and astronauts are accelerated while people back home feel time pass normally. You make a 10-year round trip and they think you've only been gone five minutes. Wait, do you age faster under the influence of the watch? Fine, apply it to crops, grow them to harvest in seconds, end world hunger.
It's somewhat justified at the beginning when the NSA clearly sees that such device can be used for more sinister purposes, such as allowing a terrorist waltz into the White House and plant an A-bomb in the President's bathtub in less than a minute, and QT could easily utilize it for their own purposes and thus orders the project be shut down. They'd presumably retaliate against all attempts to market the device since it would only be a matter of time before someone decided to apply it to said sinister purposes. Also, the protagonists' father wanted to develop it for useful purposes such as "surgery that can be done between two beats of the heart".
In highschool superhero flick Sky High, its revealed that Royal Pain invented a weapon that could turn people into babies. That's right a weapon that could instantly reverse aging. Rather than refining it and making unimaginable amounts of money from creating the device that could keep people young and offer the old back their youth, Pain instead opts to use it to turn all superheroes into infants and raise them evil.
Mr. Freeze's appearance in Batman & Robin has him stealing giant diamonds and using them to build a giant freeze ray he plans to use to hold Gotham hostage in exchange for funds to further the research he needs to save his wife. Why he doesn't just sell the giant diamonds is never explained. If not that, could have just patented the smaller ray immediately, waited for the Nobel, and wondered how many new laws in physics will be named after him. The applications are endless and he's just disproved everything known about thermodynamics. He would never again want for funds no matter what he's researching.
That's probably why the method involves giant diamonds in the first place. People surprisingly often miss the fact, that the film runs on this kind of exagerated comic-book-ish idiocy.
Literature
In Soon I Will Be Invincible, It's mentioned that after defeating Doctor Impossible, Blackwolf's corporation will patent the devices found in his base and make millions. Doctor Impossible is mostly driven by a need to prove himself to the world, and an obsession with the Zeta Dimension that isolated him from normal and academic life. This trope was also lampshaded when Doctor Impossible wondered "whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life." He also ruminates on the phenomenon that the smarter a person gets, the more likely they are to incline to the villainous side of the scale. There's even a term for it: Malign Hypercognition Disorder.
Discworld's Lord Vetinari may be the logical conclusion of this trope: he has all the trappings of an Evil Overlord, but he isn't evil, opting instead for a strategic blend of The Chessmaster and Reasonable Authority Figure, because he is intelligent enough to know that Evil is not a good long-term plan.
In Making Money, Moist von Lipwig lampshades this. As someone who had previously been a con man and was now making a respectable living, he now found himself still desiring the thrill of the chase, and "keeping his hand in" with schemes of various sorts. Someone actually mentions to him how silly it is for people to swindle and trick when better money could be made out of living honestly... he glosses over the point. Specifically, he mentions to himself that while the legal way is more profitable and in many ways easier, its also less fun.
Moist also has to deal with a forger who was causing problems until arrest. He realizes it's better to hire the guy and, probably for the thrill, breaks him out of jail.
Shortly afterwards he is terrified to realize that this was already Vetenari's plan and he just messed it up.
This is also lampshaded in Equal Rites wherein it is pointed out that the time and effort a group of brigands puts into robbing caravans could have quite easily allowed them to earn a good living if they were to work that hard at a honest trade.
And in The Last Continent, a wizard reminisces about a classmate who, sentenced to copy out lines of text as a punishment, invented a multi-pencil apparatus to write the same line several times simultaneously. Not only did building and improving his invention take more time and effort than simply copying the lines would have, and eventually lead to the student's accidental death, but using it was so much fun that classmates were breaking rules just to get a chance to try it.
Nor should we forget Victor from Moving Pictures, who studied harder than any other student wizard in Unseen University history, yet deliberately refrained from graduating, so he could keep living off a bequest by a rich relative to pay for his education. Ironically, he leaves school just as Ridcully is getting settled in as Archchancellor: an event which put an end to the practice of Klingon Promotion which Victor'd been avoiding, by not becoming a full-fledged wizard. Had he stayed, he could've spent the rest of his life eating big dinners and snoozing in room 3B.
The Goliath Corporation in the Thursday Next novels are an absolutely giant monolith who practically own Great Britain; still they insist on harebrained schemes like trying to enter fiction on a wide-scale basis. On the other hand, we infer that a large part of how they made their money in the first place was on evil schemes...
In Les Misérables, Hugo comments regarding the villain Thenardier that had he been slightly less evil, he could have been a well-to-do scoundrel, but instead, he's so crooked that he's constantly in dire financial straits.
A similar comment is offered in Vanity Fair about one character who is a stingly and sly aristocrat. The author notes that if he had been born in obscurity, he could have become a wealthy Amoral Attorney, but as a baronet, he does things like being so stingy his crops fail and engaging in constant law suits which while profitable when he wins are more frequently a financial drain.
Similar to the Roxxon example earlier, the Destroyer series inverted this at least once; in the Destroyer novel Engines of Destruction, the opponent, an agent of a Japanese company, attacks American communications as part of a patriotic bid for (as they see it) Japanese interests.
In the Paul Jennings short story The Strap Box Flier, an inventor goes from town to town selling his amazing glue which, in demonstrations, bonds instantly with a grip like steel. He then gets as far away as possible, before the townsfolk figure out the glue comes undone after four hours. Apparently it never occurred to him that a glue which allowed you to fix something immovably into place for a predictable amount of time, after which it would come undone of its own accord, would be worth an incredible fortune.
The Golden Rendezvous by Alistair MacLean. The leader of a communist Banana Republic plans to settle his debts with the Soviet Union by robbing a ship of its cargo of gold, then destroying the witnesses with a nuclear weapon he's stolen from the United States. As the nuke is the latest US mini-missile, all he has to do is give it to the Soviets in exchange for canceling his debt.
Massha: As it was, she ended up runnin' the richest kingdom in that dimension and was out to merge with me best military force around... which turned out to be the kingdom that Skeeve was babysittin'. Vic: If she was already in a position to buy anything she wanted, what did she need an army for? Massha: For those doodads that weren't for sale. You see, we all have our little dreams. Hers was to rule the world.
Averted in Daemon. Matthew Sobol gained fame and fortune as a game developer before he began his plans for posthumous world domination, and indeed leverages this wealth after his death by shortselling his own company's stock and causing it to tank.
Invoked for laughs in the parody book How to Be a Superhero by Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine. For would-be heroes with lots of money, the book says the simplest way to stop a villain is to simply out-pay the Mooks so they'll do a Heel Face Turn on the spot. Offering additional days off and better health benefits also help.
At the end of the Serpentwar Saga, Dashel Jameson, Sheriff of Krondor, renounces his noble titles and becomes the Upright Man, leader of the Krondorian Thieves Guild, succeeding his late great-uncle, Lyle Rigger. His new second-in-command asks him why he's doing this, since as the son of a Duke and the younger brother of an Earl, there's no way he could make as much money as a thief as he could legitimately. He did it as a point of honor: he had promised a thief he had fallen in love with who had died protecting the city from Keshian raiders that he would look out for the thieves.
In the book Freakonomics, the authors discuss Sudhir Venkatesh's investigation of the records of an 80s crack-dealing gang in Chicago which concluded that the average street level crack dealer would have made more money working part time at McDonald's than selling crack. They were doing it to pursue their only path to success: the hope of becoming a drug lord.
The memoirs of one James Crosbie, a moderately notorious armed robber, describe a fairly impressive list of achievements; he held a responsible position at a Kenyan mining company and for a long while was running his own quite successful metalwork business. And yet despite having earned better money during those times — to say nothing of not being on the run from the law — he claims to have felt a much lesser sense of achievement from this than from robbing banks, despite the much greater failure rate, smaller financial returns and lengthy prison sentences. Of course, a better example of an Unreliable Narrator is hard to imagine....
Justified in one of The Vampire Files, when Jack muses that gang boss Shoe Coldfield is easily brilliant and savvy enough to have made a fortune in any legitimate business he might care to go into. That is, Shoe could do so, if not that he's a black man living in 1930s Chicago, hence would never be accepted by the white business community.
Averted by Artemis Fowl, who is using his genius to make money in more legitimate ways. Among others, he has several patents and won a competition to design a new opera house in Dublin. He's making millions, but his dealings with the faeries in the first book would have made him billions.
Live-Action TV
This trope is referenced in (and possibly taken from) the Seinfeld episode "The Revenge", when the ditzy Kramer cooks up a scheme to sabotage a laundromat's washing machine. Jerry remarks "If only you'd put your mind to something useful...you're like Lex Luthor."
The Company in Prison Break is an example. They have the technology to solve most of humanity's energy and agriculture problems and hence would become both the richest and most heralded people on the planet if they were up front and honest. Instead, they run currency scams in third world countries and sell weapons to belligerents that will make them hundreds of millions, but have the potential to wipe out all of humanity if used. Along the same lines, they have the resources to infiltrate the most secret government agencies yet can't find anybody at the patent office to help protect "Scylla".
Subverted in The Wire. Stringer Bell clearly has the smarts to be running his own legitimate business empire — and by the third series it becomes clear this is something that he knows. Already he had been using college courses to firm up his understanding of economics and then applying this learning to his illegal drug dealing criminal empire, getting the whole thing running with immaculate efficiency that baffles local cops. He spends the majority of his time desperately trying to work to a point where he can go completely legitimate — an opportunity denied to him by his birth alone — but unfortunately on the road to this end he pisses of Omar Little and Crouching Bowtie Hidden Badass Brother Muzone, who team up in the third series finale and kill him dead. Bad end.
iCarly: Nevel. Despite being very young, he's obviously a pretty good computer tech or hacker or designer and such, and could probably make more money making websites if he didn't bother trying to shut down iCarly.com with various wacky schemes.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Warren Meers could have made billions with his life-like androids. Instead, he pisses away his genius robbing banks in a small California town. Then again, Warren is very emotionally immature, such that he may well not have thought of the ramifications of his machines.
All three members of Warren's "Troika" seem to have a pathological aversion to doing anything the "normal" way thanks to their histories of social isolation and trauma; this is directly referenced in the "warp drive" speech that introduces the trio, where Warren states that by subverting laws and living lives of supervillainous crime they prove their inherent superiority to people who work for a living. This seems to be hanging a lampshade on what must, after all, be a near-universal characteristic of comic-book supervillains.
Word of God is that the super-science used by the trio and a few other villains is actually an applied form of magic (which the user may not be aware of), and cannot be used in any large-scale capacity since the tech doesn't actually work. Something like Wonders in Genius The Transgression.
An episode of The Twilight Zone has a group of gold thieves trying to evade the heat. One of them accomplishes this by using a cryogenic device he made to hide for many decades instead of patenting the device and becoming a well respected and incredibly rich scientist.
In Heroes, Sylar has the ability to intuitively understand how things work. Depending on how far that reaches, and how intimate the understanding is, it could be pretty damn amazing. He's only used it on watches and villainy so far, but think about it. Physics? Quantum mechanics? Relativity? Singularities? Psychology? Economics? Sociology? Theology? Genetics? Psychiatry? "Actually knowing how things work" would win you twenty Nobel Prizes before breakfast, progress technology several hundred years forward and let you retire the most influential, wealthy, powerful and historic human being to ever live. Screw regeneration, man.
There are hints that Future Sylar used his analytical ability to good effect during his tenure as President of the United States.
As it turns out, Sylar's ability itself causes brain-eating insanity, explaining why he didn't use it to become famous as a genius rather than as a madman.
Linderman and the other members of the Company seem to be an inversion of this trope. They're spectacularly wealthy, and Linderman talks about using his healing power to help others in the past, but remarks that "helping one person at a time could never be enough"... so naturally he comes up with a scheme to end human suffering entirely by Destroying New York City.
Maybe he was taking lessons from Ozymandias?
Nearly every single Doctor Who enemy, with the exception of the Always Chaotic Evil alien species, fall victim to this trope. The Master is an intensely charismatic, competent leader, Davros is stated by the Doctor himself to be one of the finest scientific minds in existence, the Rani's genius surpasses even that of the Doctor, and the list goes on and on, yet the only thing they apply their formidable talents to is death and destruction.
This trope is simultaneously upheld and averted in that the Master and the Rani were Time Lords, and thus assured of one of the highest standards of living in the universe simply by staying at home. Davros was ruler of his home planet before creating the Daleks. They already had everything in life any reasonable person could desire before embarking on their villainous careers, and knew it - they just chose to be villains anyway in service of their un-reasonable desires, such as galaxy-conquering megalomania.
Averted in the Dalek EmpireBig Finish Doctor Who spinoffs, where the Daleks seek an alternate history where they've already conquered the entire universe. What they get is an alternate reality where the equivalent of Davros decided that you catch more flies with honey, and decided to make the Daleks good or at least well-intentioned. "You Daleks have conquered this galaxy?" "Correct" "You have waged war against its peoples, you have destroyed, you have subjugated." "Correct!" "You have committed the greatest crimes our universe has ever known! Neutralise them!" Unsurprisingly, by not being genocidal jerks, they've been far more successful, and the Daleks are rapidly reduced to the edge of extinction yet again.
Lampshaded in the Firefly episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds", where Mal, upon confronting Saffron, points out that "All the lying, all the games....there's got to be an easier way to steal." At which point she replies that Mal is assuming the payoff for her is the money.
Averted on Dollhouse, as the Rossum Corporation does make money from Alzheimer's research and the like, even if it is the imprinting technology that fits into their ultimate goals.
Lampshaded in an episode of Hancock's Half Hour when the Honest John "Sid Balmory James" discovers that spending all his time thinking up elaborate cons is a lot harder than simply going to the bank and getting an overdraft.
A heroic example occurs in the early seasons of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers with Gadgeteer Genius Billy Cranston. Despite inventing the Rangers' watches, an all but flawless communication system that offers crystal-clear reception, is apparently unhindered by any of the various hazards that get in the way of other types of broadcast signals, is completely portable, and can be used to transport matter by teleporting the Rangers to the Command Center, he never once stops to think of the vast fortune he could earn by patenting this technology.
Though it is possible that he's using tech that he gained from becoming a ranger to make it, so when he patents the things and has to explain how they work that might cause some issues.
More importantly is the fact that, making instantaneous teleportation available to the public would cause far more problems than it would solve. Sure, emergency services and freight companies would benefit, but criminals would be able to teleport into the homes of their intended victims (whether the criminal is a thief, rapist, stalker or murderer), and what about high security military areas? The only way of stopping this would be to put a force-field in every room of every building on planet Earth, which would require massive amounts of time and send power-bills skyrocketing. So there's probably a very good reason Billy (and Zordon) decided to keep teleportation-technology to themselves.
Given how the situation is described, if they can only transport to the Command Center, presumably the target location for the teleporting requires considerably more hefty technology than just the watch and criminals would not be able to teleport around at will. But the argument falls flat anyway since given that it is possible in the Rangersverse someone will determine how to do it at some point regardless and the world will have to deal with the paradigm shift anyway, and delaying that doesn't have any apparent benefits.
Actually, the communication devices somehow got linked up to the morphing grid, which is why the rangers can teleport. And whenever the morphing grid goes down (or the rangers are de-aged to the point that they're not rangers anymore), the communicators stop working as well. So Billy is an absolute genius and could make millions, but the teleportation wouldn't work for anyone not connected to the morphing grid.
Broodwing/Agent Aburera from Power Rangers S.P.D. / Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger subverts this trope in a similar manner as Arcade, by selling Mecha-Mooks and Humongous Mecha, among other black market deals, to other criminals for a substantial sum. Though one could argue why he couldn't simply do the same to local law enforcement, one must also remember that black market deals tend to avoid the financial red tape that legitimate consumerism gets tied up in (like taxes or trade embargoes), and would thus get him a wider clientele and more profits.
Happens an episode of CSI: Miami, where a pair of ex-convicts pedophiles were caught. The young one, posing as a high-school jock when he was really 28 or something, observes in front of the interrogators that he actually had good grades in school this time around, and if he would have worked hard when he was young, he would have made something of himself. One of the CSI tells him something in the like of "Instead you became a pedophile", at which he turns to a Mad Scientist line, saying "You say tomatoes, I say tomahtoes...
In the Outer Limits (1990's) episode "Final Exam" a disgruntled ex-graduate student holds a college hostage with a cold fusion bomb he created. The negotiator asks why the terrorist doesn't use his invention to win the Nobel Prize instead. The terrorist responds that if he did, than the government would lock him up in Area 51 and torture all the secrets out of him. Later on in the episode, the negotiator suggests that the reason behind the terrorist's actions is that he is absolutely terrified about the prospects of his invention and he wants to scare the world into submission.
Inverted on Tremors: The Series, when the heroes assume that an escaped creature which freezes everything it touches was created by a government Mad Scientist as a terrifying new weapon. When they actually meet the researchers who made it, they're almost disappointed when told that, no, it was supposed to be a cheap way to freeze food for military personnel and humanitarian relief operations.
In Harry's Law, it's averted at the end of the series premiere. The main character used to be a patent lawyer, and three thugs had rigged up a device to get car doors open. They decided they wanted to patent it instead.
The reality show It Takes A Thief is a security makeover show where former thieves first burgle the home or business in question, and then install security systems that would've prevented them in the first place.
Subverted in Breaking Bad. Walt is a brilliant chemist but makes very little working as a high school teacher. When He starts cooking Meth, He becomes extremely wealthy. It is even used as a point of characterization (He optionally left a company before it became hugely successful and refused to return there out of pride, even when he was offered work).
Music
The song "The Watchmaker's Apprentice" by The Clockwork Quartet is about an apprentice watchmaker who is fired after his master buys a machine that can fix watches better. The former apprentice swears revenge on his former master and breaks into his shop, where he designs and builds in only one night a watch that, once wound, will spectacularly fail at exactly six o'clock, killing it's owner in the process, and then notes that the device still keeps impeccable time. The watch is then left in the shop to be purchased by some passing innocent whose death would land on the shoulders of the former master. The plan goes off perfectly, leaving the listener to wonder why, if the apprentice is this skilled, he doesn't open up his own shop. There are hints dropped in the song that suggest that the apprentice is an Unreliable Narrator and not being exactly forthright about how things happened
Tabletop Games
The New World Of Darkness plays with this concept a great deal, often with conflicting rationale.
Mage The Awakening has the Free Council, which are a group of mages who actively and happily sell spells to other mages on a free capitalistic basis. This, of course, leads to the other Orders being actively against this method out of sheer kneejerk reaction.
Vampire: The Requiem only slightly subverts this, as two whole covenants are based on using and abusing mortal business to build themselves a herd of blood bags. The Invictus uses their vampire disciplines to make slaves of well-placed professionals in key areas of business, finance and politics, and have a somewhat perverse reputation of making the careers of these ghouls fantastically successful. The Carthian Movement, meanwhile, has so many contacts in areas of business and technology that they usually don't mind selling their knowledge of modern technology to elder vampires in exchange for political gain.
Changeling The Lost has whole Entitlements (secret Changeling organizations) dedicated to being very very good at their preferred mode of employment. The Guild of Goldspinners, for instance, has a Rumplestiltskin-like ability to manufacture gold from nowhere. They realize that somebody will eventually catch on to this scheme, so they use their manufactured gold to buy real businesses and get real economic stability. Another Entitlement, the Knights of the Knowledge of the Tongue, open up Hedge-based restaurants and catering businesses to exploit the vast supply of magical fruit in their alternate dimension. And the Legates of the Black Apple take this even further — their job is to negotiate with the True Fae and find out what it'll take to make them happy and get them to go away. Yes, they're the guys who discuss terms with Lex Luthor and write his checks.
The Old World Of Darkness averted this trope pretty hard. The most powerful reason for not exploiting supernatural powers or super-science is that this setting was the trope namer for the Masquerade. Whether it was shadowy government agents, other mages, Pentex, werewolves, other vampires, or worse, there was someone just waiting to swat down anyone who revealed too much. Smart players would occasionally try to get a great deal of money through creative and very subtle uses of their powers, though even this had the potential to attract just the wrong kind of attention from smart STs. Even something as simple as getting "lucky" with your powers at a casino might mean that the vampire prince or local Syndicate agents of the city has images of you at the tables and keeps you on a short list of "people to watch like hawks."
The tabletop RPG Aberrant pretty directly averts this trope. Novas, thanks to their power, are pretty much assured to be able to make 6-7 figures right off the bat, so there's little motivation to turn to crime. As a result, the conflicts between factions is less about what side of the law they're on and more about where novas fit into the law - Project Utopia believes that novas need to be controlled strictly, the Teragen believe that novas are beyond the laws of regular humanity, and the Aberrants sit in between the two, feeling that while novas need to fit into society as a whole, society must also change to allow novas freedom.
However, the four major criminal organizations all employ novas, thus playing this trope semi-straight. Even here, it's subverted, since organized crime on this level both pays competitive wages and isn't significantly more dangerous than, say, joining Team Tomorrow.
Even so, many of the novas working for the criminal organizations in question are doing so because they were already members before erupting, or otherwise had ties of loyalty or emotion to the outfit. The rest are second-stringers who don't have the power or the inclination to go on the world superpowered mercenary circuit, where the killing is all legalized and the A-list players can make hundreds of millions.
In the fan-made Genius The Transgression, the geniuses would really love it if someone would cut them a check for their inventions. Since their inventions are, in fact, powered by Magic Powered Pseudoscience and tend to break down in horrific and inventive ways if used by Muggles, this really isn't feasible.
The sourcebook lampshades this: One genius speaking to another states that they could build their superscience miracle machines, then tear them apart and look for the parts that are actually functional technology, discarding the magical pseudoscience parts... but they note that this feels a lot like killing your sickly firstborn to sell his useful organs.
In its earliest appearances, Mitsuhama Computer Technologies from Shadowrun were depicted as a front for the yakuza. Eventually, the writers caught on that a billion-nuyen criminal organization is hardly going to use a trillion-nuyen triple-A Mega Corp as a cover, and inverted this trope, making the original investors some yakuza oyabun who are now retired (and obscenely rich) oyabun, who still cheerfully keep in touch with their old friends whenever MCT needs some deniable subcontractors.
Explicitly stated for The Thieves' Guild, a criminal gang in the Freedom City setting of Mutants & Masterminds. Six inventors, all brilliant in their particular field, and they rob banks. Of course, they're also all psychotic in their own particular way.
Also, most of them are just oddly shaped bombs or just flame-throwers mounted on the wrist and the like. Of the three that have actual super-science, two found the inventions of other super-criminals. Mad Mapal's comes from a man that TRIED to get funding and patents, but couldn't because it was the 30s and he was black. Weather Vein's controler is a leftover weather control device of Big-Bad Stratos, who now has innate weather control powers. The only one who actually has super-tech that they understand is Looking Glass, and she's so vain she believes that everything is owed to her and she should never have to work for her money.
Subverted by the Huckster. He originally started out selling his inventions, but they were so defective as to be outright hazardous, and he was sued for everything. So he decided to use his defective products as weapons. It should be noted that it works stupidly well. He weaponized fail.
Also subverted by Conundrum, a Riddler Captain Erzatz. After being put away, he realized that his genius could be better spent hiring out as a consultant to villains, helping them plan their scheams. As such, he 'villains by proxy' and gets paid for it. He enjoys it when he outwits the heroes that try to foil 'his plans', and as such feels no need to risk himself with regular theft and the like.
Grab the rule books to any given edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Now, read the spells. Now take a moment to figure out all the ways an enterprising spellcaster could make untold amounts of money without crawling into dark caves, killing ugly people, and stealing their stuff. Depending on how much magic is in a given setting, this may border on Reed Richards Is Useless. Smart GMs know that finding better motivations than gold is necessary right about the first time players realize crawling around musty old catacombs is not the only thing they can do.
This is already addressed in a number of settings. Even the old 1st Edition rules offered the rates that NPC spellcasters would charge for casting particular spells, and a number of settings feature wizards who sell low-level magic items such as scrolls and potions as a means of raising extra funds for their research.
The spells themselves have uses outside adventuring that could be absurdly lucrative. For example, in 3.5 the Fabricate spell could be used to create a ton of trade goods for one third their market cost (the raw material's cost). The character could then - rules as written - dump them in the market for half their value, turning 1/6 the market value in profit for working about one minute per day. By exploiting common items and hiring a few common folk to handle the transactions (getting raw materials and then selling the goods), a caster could make thousands of gold every day they are hanging out between adventures. A caster doesn't even need to know how to make the good if it's of modest quality; checks are only required for high-end goods. At the minimum level, a caster can make 90 cubic feet of finished goods, 9 cubic feet if they include minerals. That's a full warehouse of clothing in seconds to sell at cut rates to make fast cash. Put every tailor in the city out of work in minutes. Offer local armies their uniforms at half the price they were paying, with a healer's kit for every squad as a bonus. Make dozens of suits of armor to supply rookie adventurers. Mass produce alchemical goods in seconds. The abuses are endless - and will be shut down by the GM as fast as they can dreamt them up. To give you an idea how insane this gets, a common laborer earns 1/10 of a gold coin per day.
Continual Flame, Continual Light in early editions, are equally abusive and available at lower level. The obvious 3.5 use is making Everburning Torches. They cost 50 gold pieces to make with a market price of 110. Even if the GM forces the players to accept that Karl Marx Hates Your Guts and sell at half price everyone else is selling at, that's still a sizable profit every day the caster is sitting on their tail. If he can get away with selling three a day at 80% of market price, in a month of downtime the caster would make a few thousand in gold.
Minor Creation allows a caster to use a tiny sample of whatever he plans to make to create the objects, making several cubic feet of the goods. The yield is lower than Fabricate, but it is available earlier and requires nearly no start up cost in raw materials. Spamming trade goods would still make a caster rich with a few minutes of work a day for just a few months.
If a cleric's sponsor has no objections, a cleric may make a similar fortune just providing Remove Disease and healing magic to those who can afford his services. Rules as written, that's 150 gold per casting per day - even if the church takes half, the cleric ends up with thousands at the end of the month if he finds just two patients a day. Demand would never dry up - sickness is ubiquitous. He also has the advantage of not needing to create something and then sell it; he's paid on the spot and if the call to adventure comes, he doesn't have his fortune tied up at the moment. And you thought doctors were expensive. A cleric, however, will not be allowed to sit on his laurels, seeing how he is a god's champion.
One exception to that little caveat: a cleric devoted to Mouqol, the Merchant God, should have no spiritual issues with accepting and keeping a profit.
Craft and to a lesser extent Perform and Profession skills, even at low levels, can do this. The character could be earning enough money (given his level) that the loot from a typical early adventure doesn't justify the danger. They, by comparison to the average person, are living like kings. At low levels, if there is down time (say a month or two) between adventures, the characters may make as much or more money at their day jobs as they do slaying orcs. As adventurers rise in levels, the monetary value of their rewards rises exponentially, while the monetary value of plying their skills increases slowly. It's linear craftspeople, quadratic adventurers in terms of wealth, which may explain in part why people are willing to take those early risks. This can be a huge, hilarious headache for the GM who finds that the characters have far better gear than their level should allow because they can afford it.
Eberron has classes specializing in mass production of magical items.
Many of whom spend their time adventuring rather than setting up shop...
The Arcane/Mercane (as it was renamed) race from all editions sold magical items this way.
Video Games
From the Resident Evil series is the Mega Corp Umbrella Corporation, which had enough legitimate profit as the world's leading pharmaceutical company to not be dabbling in bio-weapons. And on top of that, when you consider what they are able to accomplish with their research, they'd probably make much, much more money pursuing something legitimate and marketable, as opposed to selling mutants and skinless dogs on the black market.
What makes it even more sad is that all the money that was invested in making these biological weapons could have vastly improved the lives of the civilian world. The biology of the Regenerators for example would single-handily have revolutionized hospital healing forever, people wounded in accidents or in combat could have their scars and lost limbs regenerated and would effectively make people immortal as the parasite could potentially regenerate the effects of aging on the body. All these villains could have helped people had they wanted to and still have made a huge profit off of it.
In one of the Wesker's Files, when Wesker himself wonders why so much funding is being invested in the further development of the T-Virus when it is already developed enough to be a profitable and formidable bio-weapon. He concludes that Spencer must have an ulterior motive in the development of the T-Virus, which Resident Evil 5 later sheds more light on. Ever since he discovered the Progenitor Virus and its mutagenic properties, Spencer envisioned a new world order populated by a "superior breed of humans" that would share his values and worship him as a god. When the first project to create the new master race failed because Albert Wesker was the only one to survive the viral injections that were part of the project Spencer presumably had Umbrella continue research on mutagenic viruses to keep his dream alive. One document in-game even states that Spencer never considered Umbrella to be anything more than just another tool to further his ambitions. He wasn't even worried when Umbrella went under, since only the "worthless" employees would be hurt.
Lampshaded in City of Heroes. Sometimes NPCs will say "If the Sky Raiders really only wanted money they would just sell their jetpack designs. There is something more." Crey Corporation plays this straight, albeit somewhat deconstructed. They make a lot of products that could be much more valuable as actual products rather than tools of mass destruction — most impressively demonstrated in the use Brain Uploading, human cloning, targeted genetic engineering, and countless lesser technologies to make the same sort of security force that the other factions essentially get free. They also make countless products just for consumer and military purchase, whether ethical or not, and said security forces are necessary to keep the less ethical products working and profitable. In addition, Countess Crey is less interested in money and more interested in protecting the human race from uncaring heroes, violent threats, andcorrupt and uncaring corporations.
Averted in the original Mega Man Battle Network game by Higsby, a teacher employed by the WWW to brainwash the students of ACDC and steal their rare chips for himself. He later opens up a chip shop.
In the subsequent games of the serie, Dr.Regal and even Wily do this too.
The text in the background of robot master room in Mega Man 2 reads Dr. Wily Teleport System. The Megas commented that he could be rich if he patented his design.
Justified, in that pretty much every major robot in the various Megaman series seems to possess some unexplained form of teleportation anyway.
The second arcade game has Dr. Wily reveal that he accidentally discovered "Bassnium" while developing a robot, Bass of course, to destroy Mega Man. Wily also explains that not only is Bassnium the strongest source of energy on Earth, but that he's refining it into something better, which will be used for Zero. Obviously, it will never occur to him to bring that technology to market and be worshiped for creating an alternative energy source.
Averted hard in BioShock, as Andrew Ryan forbade Rapture citizens from maintaining any contact with the outside world in order to protect his technologically advanced underwater city from "parasites," foreign governments, and anything else that might disrupt his Objectivism-based capitalist paradise. It didn't work...
Still, the people of Rapture have discovered technologies including, but not limited to, highly sophisticated robots, superpowers and technology allowing for entire underwater cities, not to mention cloning and mind control. If he returned to the surface with these marvels of human engineering, he'd not only be the richest and most adored man alive, but the government would most likely praise him and give him all the peace and quiet he wants.
Many players can attest that in Sonic 2's Casino Night Zone, Eggman very nearly succeeded in getting Sonic addicted to gambing at the slot machines.
In Sonic Battle, it's stated that he actually does sell some of his robots to make money. Of course, that money is then used to finance his next world domination plot...
Sonic Riders also features hoverboards designed and sold by the "Robotnik Corp." Whether the Robotnik in question is Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik or a relative of his is never touched upon.
Sonic Colors, of course, plays this totally straight. Robotnik actually builds such an amusement park, which is certainly not associated with any evil plans. Not surprisingly, it's a cover for an evil plan; he's building a mind control ray in the center of this upper-orbit theme park.
Reeve from Final Fantasy VII is a genius inventor and robotics expert. Instead of getting rich with his skills, he got a pointless job at Shinra as a spy, for a cause he doesn't even really agree with. Which leads to a Heel Face Turn pretty quickly. Of course, since Shinra probably was the only company around that could buy it (having an army and all), any attempts to sell it would have likely ended about as well anyway.
Might have something to do with getting the sweetheart job as lead designer for the largest and most technologically advanced city in the world though.
Subverted by Wario. After a couple of games serving as Mario's rival and all the while playing a greedy Anti-Hero role, he finally went on to become the founder of the honest WarioWare business and is presumably wealthier than ever.
You honestly believe that anything with Wario's name in it could possibly be classified as honest? Case in point: he never actually pays any of his employees. Not that any of them seem to mind.
Oh, they mind! In WarioWare D.I.Y. some of his employees actually escaped his clutches and went to work in another company (more namely, Diamond Software) while others stayed with him and formed the new Wario-Man Software.
Even before turning to "legitimate" business, Wario had the epiphany that the reason robbing Mario wasn't working was because he was the bad guy. So instead he robbed pirates, because then he wouldn't be the villain and nobody would mind except the pirates.
Scarface: The World Is Yours. In the game (and in the movie) Scarface tries to calm down several tense situations by offering to hire the other person.
In the world of Portal, Aperture Science should win an award for Most Impractical Applications of Scientific Inventions That Could Revolutionize the World. Compact, functional teleportation. Fully realized A.I. Complete negation of injury from falling. Hard Light. Substances with negative friction and 100% elasticity. Not to mention being able to instantaneously travel to and from the moon and gaining easy access to all of its resources and tourism potential. And every single one of them was invented purely by accident (the Portal Gun stemmed from their attempt to make new and better shower curtains, and the gels were initially intended to be substitutes for pudding). From a practical point of view, their products are typically so horrifyingly unsafe that they could never be marketed anyway.
Team Fortress 2: Blutarch and Redmond Mann have hired teams of elite mercenaries to fight over lumbermills, granaries, and barren scraps of land in the middle of Death Valley, even though, according to the timeline, they literally own half the world. Possibly subverted, as they hold a deep grudge due to their father's hatred of their own stupidity, forcing them into cooperation by giving them a split share of the company's land.
In another strip, a villain spent a lottery jackpot and then had to borrow even more money in order to complete his teleportation device. Rather than market it, he uses it in a revenge scheme against his former mentor, for allegedly stealing his ideas. This is made especially stupid when one considers that the mentor hadn't stolen his pupil's ideas, as even the scientifically ignorant Shadehawk could tell that the principles behind villain's working device and the mentor's still hypothetical device had nothing in common from a one sentence description of each.
Khrima in Adventurers!! never thinks to bring to market his technological advances, from superweapons to robot chefs, as he is enamored with the idea of being evil and conquering the world.
In Sluggy Freelance Hereti-Corp actually does seem to get a lot of money by selling weapon designs to the military, running a web design company, and even setting up a chain of pizza restaurants. They'd probably manage to avoid the Villain Ball altogether, except that every Hereti-Corp CEO seems obsessed with capturing Oasis for as yet unidentified reasons. (Well, mostly unidentified: we always knew that Oasis was "special" in a nonhuman way and that Dr. Steve, her "creator", defected from HC.)
White Noise of Last Res0rt ends up in jail for hacking into a space station (and thus killing several people in the process)... and spends his time in jail wisely, writing up an encryption system as a workaround to the prison's security filters so he can have internet access. The prison turns around and convinces him to sell them the algorithm in exchange for several prison perks (as well as money, of course), providing him with a comfortable (albeit lonely) existence.
Eventually subverted in Something Positive, when one of Aubrey's get-rich-quick schemes eventually works, making her a rather successful and considerably less psychotic businesswoman. Then later on, she finds herself getting bored and takes a sabbatical to try out some of her older crazy schemes.
This trope is the driving force behind Evil Inc. A comic about a supervillain who starts a legitimate company to cater to supervillains. When a traditionalist complains he is losing sight of what evil is, he just shows him the legitimate profit margins and smiles. An often repeated motto in the strip is, "You can do more evil if you do it legally."
Rusty and Co.'s Fourth Wall Mail Slot, regarding the monsters' abilities, informs us that Rusty's metal-corroding ability is routinely used for "antiquing furniture for fun an' profit". For a rust monster it means being paid for licking food (carefully).
Subverted in Sam and Fuzzy, where Mr. Sin's core idea is to market his inventions and get rich on them. Played straight in that he's a Mad Scientist and most of his inventions are created in very illegal ways, not to mention tend to go terribly, terribly wrong during the development stage.
Subverted in Spinnerette in the backstory of Dr. Universe. Originally he and his assistant Greta were actually in the process of making free unlimited energy. However since they planned to supply China (who provided their funding) with said energy, they were shut down by the government.
The Evil Mastermind, leader of Evil Mensa, invented a foolproof, hand-portable, lightweight fusion reactor. He uses it to power his weapons in order to strike back at his enemies rather than improve the world.
Doctor Armageddon's first act of super-science was to cure his own leukemia. Did he then release his cancer cure to the world at large and make himself rich? Of course not. He used his knowledge of genetic engineering and epidemiology to hold entire cities hostage.
Doctor Simian spins off new technologies as easily as you or I breathe. But all he wants to do is rule the world of man.
Averted in the case of benevolent Mad Scientist Fiona Richards, who invented a cure for nearly 70% of all types of cancer... and then made herself a billionaire by mass-producing the cure and distributing it world-wide.
Leather: "If Leonardo Lucas was just after world domination, he wouldn't build giant robots and death rays. He'd get an assload of patents, make three billion dollars, and join the fucking Republican party."
Dr. Horrible said it best: "It's not about making money, it's about taking money."
Averted in the Whateley Universe. Plenty of the mad scientists do, in fact, patent their inventions, and figure out uses for them. Furthermore, Ayla Goodkind is making it sure to look for these people and CUT them checks.
And this is mercilessly lampshaded by Ayla Goodkind (formerly, one of the richest teenagers on the planet before becoming a mutant and getting kicked out of the family) herself, when she complains that Whateley Academy needs better contract law help for these inventors, and courses to teach the inventors how not to get robbed by the Corrupt Corporate Executive so they have to turn to crime later in life.
Averted in a literal version of this trope, where Lex actually asks the President for a bailout check, but Superman fixes the economy.
Played straight in Darwin's Soldiers by Dr. Tinner. If he had just worked around the flaws in his virtual reality machine rather than using it to hide illegal projects in a big "screw you" to the world, he'd be a rich man.
This is Edwin Windsor's job in How to Succeed in Evil — talk to would-be supervillains and try to get them to use their abilities and talents in an efficient and profitable manner, rather than for grandiose and overly complex schemes they seem so fond of. To his endless frustration, they rarely listen to him.
Subverted humorously in one of Spoony's reviews, in which he points out how contrived an "anti-magic force field" is. The review promptly cuts to Dr. Insano launching into a commercial in which he's selling viewers his anti-magic force field generators (raretanium not included). The commercial implies that Insano has sold several other "fantastic" products in this manner.
In Happy Tree Friends, Sniffles creates a fully functional time machine, shrink ray, remote-controlled robot, and drill tank, yet uses all of these for mundane and stupid uses instead of patenting them. Although sometimes it's possible that, given the nature of the show, he's simply killed before he can do this.
In Atop the Fourth Wall Linkara convinces Linksano to drop his bid for conquering the world by pointing out the sheer number of problems that go into ruling a conquered world, then offers full access to his Holodeck so he can act out his mad dreams under safer circumstances. He also tells Linksano that this comes with the condition that if he tries to betray Linkara, he'll dump him on the same planet Lord Vyce is on. And he doubts Vyce will be happy to see him.
Western Animation
Most of the Captain Planet villains. Dr. Blight, for example, can invent a time machine, but her best plan for making money with it is to sell a nuke to Hitler. Meanwhile one has to wonder if Looten Plunder or Hoggish Greedly have any business projects that don't involve cheerfully destroying the Earth.
Subverted, however, with Sly Sludge, who eventually does go legit after being told recycling could be just as profitable as his usual poaching/polluting gigs (Except for metals, it isn't). In a very strange play on this, he invents a device that shrinks garbage in response to a landfill crisis.
Batman: The Animated Series explored the concept with most of its reoccurring villains. Their potential successes are all the more tragic when their origin Hope Spot for redemption is crushed by external forces or their own compulsions, and most never return to it if they actually become insane. The Penguin, who is sane enough to admit associating with criminal riffraff is pretty distasteful anyway and he'd make much more profit with a skimming-off-the-top grey market nightclub.
And Mister Freeze has a gun which fires "a beam of intense cold". He's just poked a hole in the laws of thermodynamics and could make billions using that technology to revolutionize cryogenics, but he just uses it as a theme weapon. Freeze's main motivation is vengeance for what happened to his wife anyway — it's not about the money for him, it's about having a way to lash out at the world.
Also, a business mogul in a later episode does take an interest in Freeze's technology... but more in his physical condition and refrigeration suit than his weaponry. He doesn't sell it off because he simply wants to keep it selfishly for himself to prolong his life.
In Freeze's reappearance in Batman Beyond, it's mentioned that he is wealthy and puts his fortune towards making amends to the families who were hurt by his villainous actions in the past.
In the Diniverse the Riddler started out using his incredible talents for legitimate gain, creating an incredibly popular video game that made his company a fortune. The name of the episode could have also been the name of this trope — "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?" It was only after his boss shafted him out of his share of the game's profits that the Riddler became a villain.
The Batman uses this as well, using his genius to create a device that allows the human brain to read and recall data as fast as a computer, only to get screwed over by his Hot Scientist collegue.
Going back to TAS, on another occasion Riddler does become quite wealthy through legitimate means, as a toy designer and pitchman. However, the temptation to go back to his criminal ways and try to outwit Batman eats at him continuously, and he decides that the only way he'll ever be able to happily live a normal life is if he kills Batman first. That goes about as well as you'd expect.
And on yet another occasion in the spinoff comic The Batman Adventures, he signs a deal with some out-of-town businessmen who find that the device he's used to hijack broadcasts can be the basis for a super-advanced cell phone which makes him millions. He finds an outlet for his ongoing urges by sending Batman riddles without actual crimes attached.
And then there's the Scarecrow, who apparently founded a completely legitimate chemical company after he was fired from Gotham University. Despite this, he still feels the need to dress up in a scarecrow outfit and terrorize Gotham U's faculty. The Scarecrow even directly lampshades it when he says that this isn't about money-it's about revenge. He subverts this trope in a later appearance when he uses his fear chemicals to terrify pro athletes and make them botch their performances while he bets against them as a means of raising money to buy more chemicals.
In Justice League, Luthor's schemes against Superman eventually get him arrested, so he has to turn away from his legitimate lifestyle in order to save his own life with the help of the Ultra-Humanite, who, in the same two-parter, is cut several checks and accepts every one; even the one from Batman to betray his team of villains.
Lex is later called out for living this trope when it's revealed that while he was in prison his right hand woman, Mercy, had taken over his company. Lex shows up at her front door after escaping from the League demanding help; she turns him away stating that his criminal activities and his obsession with destroying Superman nearly bankrupted the company and she was not going to let him bring it down again after all of her hard work to make it a legitimate business. He eventually does manage to take it back.
This trope is lampshaded in an episode of Justice League with a guy who invents a time machine and only uses it to steal minor trinkets from different eras for his collection. When his wife finds out about it she cusses him out for inventing a freaking time machine and not being able to come up with anything better to do with it than commit petty thefts, implying he lacks any imagination or ambition. Of course, she completely ignored his speech about the dangers of the space-time continuum being damaged by rampant time travel abuse. It is then subverted when he takes his wife's advice to heart and very bad things happen when he sets himself up as the lord of space and time.
Superman: Doomsdaytakes this trope to it's logical conclusion. Luthor has apparently invented the cure for muscular dystrophy, and immediately orders it to be turned into an expensive, lifetime-long treatment instead of a one-shot cure to make what is certainly a billion dollar discovery even more profitable.
In Wacky Races, Dick Dastardly's Mean Machine is obviously the fastest car in the races and he always manages to get ahead of everyone else. If he wasn't so adamant in cheating and causing the other racers to get further behind of his considerable lead, he could have easily won every single race.
The Beagle Boys Inc. from the Scrooge McDuck universe have moments or clarity like these: in one story, they realize that at their rate of success, they make an average 14 cents per hour. In another story, they open an ice cream parlor as a front to plan a bank robbery, and to their own surprise make good honest money with it. However, they still pull their bank robbery through and, inevitably, lose everything.
An episode of DuckTales had them realizing they had musical talent, and thus Ma Beagle signs them in a record deal under Scrooge's label as part of a plan to rob the Money Bin. However, the Boys find their new lifestyle extremely profitable...even Scrooge is making money off of them, despite their excessive demands, so they go legit. However, Ma Beagle is a believer in Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad, and as such sabatoges them so they're forced to go back to being villains.
Inverted with the villain Shriek. Shriek started out as an ordinary sound engineer trying to sell his invention — a high-powered sonic projector capable of breaking concrete — as demolitions equipment. The person he tried to sell it to, Derek Powers, Big Bad and co-owner of the Wayne-Powers corporation, rejected it as too costly. Instead, Powers hired the man to kill Bruce Wayne so he could get full control of the company. The engineer crossed paths with the new Batman, and ended up deafened by his own equipment. Unhinged by what happened to him, the engineer took the name Shriek and became a villain for real.
Subverted in another episode where a rich weapons designer is fired. After getting rejected from many highly competitive companies he finds someone interested in the designs of a sonic weapon that he created for his old company. He then dons a costumed villain persona so he can steal them without getting arrested. His only reason for becoming a villain was so he could support his family's wealthy lifestyle, not any sick thrill in it.
Played unfortunately straight with Batman Beyond's version of Spellbinder, a psychologist who uses sophisticated Mind Control devices to hypnotize people into stealing for him. Aside from the fact that he's invented all this hypnotic equipment but can't think of anything better to do with it than trick people into stealing for him, several fans have noted how Spellbinder probably doesn't even make a profit on his crimes, since the goods he steals likely aren't worth more than the amount of money he must have spent building all those fancy gizmos. And then there's the fact that the guy is a high school psychologist with no discernible engineering training... Maybe he somehow got his hands on some devices invented by the Mad Hatter?
In his introductory episode, Spellbinder says "For years I fought the demons in the heads of those ungrateful little snots, while their coddling parents paid their garbagemen more than me!" So chalk him up as another "I'm mad as heck, and I'm not gonna take it anymore" type.
Spellbinder later got wiser to this and began marketing his equipment as virtual reality generators that allowed people to live out their fantasies. Of course, he 'marketed' it like a drug pusher and got taken down by Batman for it.
Played with when Dr. Drakken hires a villainous clerical assistant. The assistant helps him come up with a scheme that consists, in part, of using the resources available to him as a supervillain to open a chain of muffin shops as part of the plan. The muffin shops prove to be so successful that Drakken's villain lair starts looking and sounding more like the nerve center of a consumer-driven corporation, and Shego finds that Drakken is losing track of the world-domination aspect of the plan and is contemplating "spinning off the world-domination division".
One plot had Drakken working undercover selling ice cream. He was amazed how profitable it was.
Not to mention taking over Bueno Nacho, an established, worldwide fastfood chain in So The Drama as part of one of his "take over the world" schemes.
Subverted by an episode of Batman: The Animated Series which centers around a villain named "The Interrogator" who uses his talent at creating Death Traps as a means of terrifying his victims into giving up the info he wants, and typically performs his services for hire.
An episode of Back at the Barnyard, while admittedly a parody, had "Cowman" fighting a botany-themed villain. His motives boiled down to his monstrous plant hybrids never winning the blue ribbon at the county fair. However, while pretending to be a friendly Willy Wonka-style wandering botanist, he plants a seed that instantly sprouts into an ice cream tree. Perhaps that one alone could have won him a blue ribbon. Or Nobel Prize.
In Transformers Animated, when the creator of the Headmasters is fired for wanting to make something with military applications, he decides to make his own company... and start it by stealing approximately 6.3 metric buttloads of money. This requires him to ignore that 1) he could just get a grant from any number of other companies that do work with the military without stealing and 2) if he actually got the amount of money he demanded, he and several dozen generations of his descendants would never have to work another day in their lives. But then he's a Straw Losergamer nerd, so...
A lot of Scooby-Doo villains are like this. The time, resources, and energy involved in creating fake ghosts for their scare-everyone-off-so-I-can-dig-up-the-treasure plan has to outweigh any payoff for at least half of the bad guys.
A more specific example, any of the episodes where the villains had ridiculously over the top intelligent robots under their command. One of the original series cases had the faceless zombie robot villain, which was literally a robot used to steal things for the villains, but could probably pass the Turing Test (and could apparently drive a car). Why the villain never uses it for any scientific purpose is probably baffling, since it could make more money than the crimes.
One of those episodes justifies it though — while the amusement park was being terrorized by a real robot, the robot had actually been built to run the rides and was never meant to malfunction like that. It turns out that the inventor's wife screwed with it because she thought that children needed actual humans looking after them. So while the robot wasn't cashed in, it also wasn't used for theft.
Averted in "Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost", where the locals concocted the ghost specifically to attract tourists. That doesn't mean there isn't an actual ghost, of course...
The villains in the new series, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, have this worse than any of the others, as their costumes are far more realistic and advanced than previous series. What's even worse about this? Crystal Cove, the place they're haunting, has hauntings as their primary tourist attraction. They could probably make a fortune by opening a haunted house legally. This is balanced, however, in that most of them have motivations that are more personal rather than money based. Still, the ones who are money based would probably be better off doing something legal.
Cracked posits that the serieses are actually set in a Crapsack World where even geniuses can't get jobs.
Stripperella. Spoofed with El Cheapo, who plans elaborate crimes designed to get him the world's largest fake diamond, or a stash of copper bars worth up to $16.
"We'll be hundredaires!"
Used in an episode of The Tick. Supervillain the Mother of Invention, bitter that the best inventions are already spoken for, has a plan to kidnap history's greatest inventors, regressing the present day to a technical dark age so he can steal the inventors' creations and pass them off as his own. In order to achieve this plan, he has invented a helmet which can grab people and objects out of history and transport them to the present. Ben Franklin: "I wish I'd invented that."
According to Word Of God, a Missing Episode of SWAT Kats would've subverted this trope, with the re-captured villains Hard Drive and former Madcat Lenny Ringtail being hired by the Enforcers as detectives.
According to Word Of God, Gargoyles's David Xanatos really does make a lot of honest money from the impressive technology his companies develop. He just doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't take (for instance) his groundbreaking genetic research and use it to develop and sell treatments for hereditary diseases, and to create killer mutant hitmen that he can send against his enemies. This is of course perfectly in character for Xanatos — eating his cake and having it too is sort of his specialty...
The Simpsons: Parodied in one of Bart Simpson's flights of fancy, while he's digging for treasure in the back yard:
Pirate: Captain, this time, instead of burying the treasure, why don't we use it to buy things? You know, things we like? Captain:(shoots him)
Phineas and Ferb's Dr. Doofenshmirtz makes one "-inator" after another, many of which could probably have very practical uses. Yet he never seems to consider the possibility of patenting and mass-producing these items. Instead, he uses them for "evil" (or what he perceives as evil).
Though he does have his own corporation and seems pretty well set for money generally. The evil is just a way of life. The corporation's name is Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated, complete with an upbeat jingle. It is possible that somehow, he manages to make money off of his "evil", whenever a platypus isn't kicking his ass.
Later episodes reveal that Doofenshmirtz has an incredibly wealthy ex-wife who pays him alimony. Apparently he doesn't need to make money — the company (which, notably, doesn't seem to have any normal employees) exists solely to help him with his villainy.
The lampshade almost blocks the screen in "Candace Gets Busted", where his view of a drive-in movie screen is blocked by a new building, and instead of just moving his chair, table and lamp to the next window along, he builds a raygun to zap the building away.
That is, of course, the running gag of Doofenshmirtz. He doesn't have a grand scheme to take over the world. Occasionally, a desire to rule the tri-state area is mentioned, but mostly, it is just minor annoyances and petty grudges that he uses brilliant inventions to try to take care off. Even if he did sell his inventions, money wouldn't solve the Rutherford B. Hayes statue he dislikes by his building. Turning it into bread, on the other hand...
Doofenshmirtz's traps. Sure, Perry escapes rather quickly, but Dr. D has something to capture Perry nearly every single time, wherever and however Perry comes in. If they are even partially effective against highly skilled platypus secret agents, how good would they be against, say, a run-of-the-mill burglar?
Phineas & Ferb themselves are also textbook examples, with their extraordinary ability to build ludicrously ambitious rollercoasters, robots, cold fusion, time machines and what-all, but they just do it for fun and aren't bothered by the losing the results shortly afterwards. Particularly obvious when they become pop stars, and tear up the lucrative contract they're offered because they're following a plan to be One Hit Wonders, and had reached the "throw diva tantrum" stage.
They do give away for free some of the inventions they make like the Monster Truck field and the Soccer X (whatever thing)
Inverted in The Spectacular Spider-Man, where NormanOsborn gets paid quite a handsome sum of money from Tombstone to create supervillains who will distract Spider-Man and keep him from cutting into Tombstone's profits. When the supervillains then get jailed, Norman (as New York's resident expert in corporate superscience) then gets paid by the government to build cells capable of holding them. As Hammerhead puts it, he gets paid coming and going. Most of said supervillains were already small-time crooks or bitter and revenge-driven to start with, so there's no real mystery as to why they never consider honest work themselves after they become super-powered.
Also inverted with the series' version of Vulture. He invents his trademark jetpack with wings, but Norman cheats him out of it so he can't legally make any money of it.
Sandman exists somewhere in the middle, his entire life's dream was to be a criminal and land the proverbial "big score", having super-powers just makes it easier. He still comes into conflict with Spider-Man, but only because Spidey tries to stop him, there's nothing personal about it, he himself says that "Revenge is for chumps!".
Subverted by Mysterio and the Tinkerer, who create amazingly advanced technologies including Ridiculously Human Robots, which they use in working for high-paying crime lords and foreign governments. Mysterio's dressing in a costume and playing the role of a hammy villain is in part a distraction from what he's really doing-namely, stealing scientific equipment for the Master Planner.
WordGirl villain The Butcher has the power to produce seemingly-infinite meat from his hands, but rarely seems to use this power to actually sell meat, despite the fact that he could do it at unbeatable prices with every cent being profit. Likewise Dr. Two-Brains and Tobey never seem to think of using their genius engineering skills to a more profitable use than stealing cheese and throwing annoyed fits, respectively.
While not as skilled as the above three, Chuck the Evil Sandwich-Making Guy has attempted a legitimate job in no less than three episodes: "Chuck the Nice Pencil Selling Guy", "Chuck Makes a Buck" and "Lunchlady Chuck", only to go back to crime at the end due to some small slight. In the first, for example, Chuck goes crazy when his boss, (played by the late Peter Graves), doesn't like sandwiches, which to the villain are Serious Business. It later turned out he was unaware that grilled cheese was a type of sandwich.
Shredder from the 1987 version of TMNT. He has lots of alien technology in the Technodrome, and all he can think of using it for is attempting to take over the world. If he were to use it legally, he would probably have enough money to legally rule the world. True it wasn't technically his, but he could easily kill Krang and steal it. Subverted with the cartoon's version of Baxter Stockmen, who tries selling his inventions legally at first but is turned down. Arguable in the 2003 version. As noted above, Stockmen in that version uses his inventions legally and illegally. Not mentioned is the Shredder, who has advanced technology that he does not use for anything other than attempts at killing the turtles and the Utroms (Stockmen's mousers were the only time he used anything to rob banks). An odd case is during the three part "Return to New York" episode it's revealed there are lots of weapons in his tower that he doesn't even use. It's possibly justified because he probably wants to maintain a technological edge over everyone else on Earth. Justified case in "Rouge in the House" where his minions find technology left by the Utroms, which they could not reverse engineer. Arguably subverted during "Exodus" when it turns that he was using lots of alien technology he was secretly acquiring to build a spaceship to get off the Earth.
In "Insane in the Membrane", it's mentioned by several people that before the Mouser thing, Stockman really was a respected scientist who was well known for his legitimate work. He started to blame April leading the turtles to him as the point at which his life went badly. Of course, as the title suggests, he wasn't very sane by that point.
Plankton in SpongeBob SquarePants. Ironically, his villainous schemes are partially motivated by his trying and failing to start a successful restaurant, and that his evil plans could succeed by simply legitimately purchasing a Krabby Patty. He apparently has a super computer program that can analyze the formula from a sample.
Apparently, Krabs knows that too, and refuses to sell him a Patty. Even if it means refusing money. Squidward and even SpongeBob have had this drilled into them enough to know not to sell to him. Plus, the successful restaurant thing is only part of his plan to take over the world using buckets.
He could, HIRE someone to buy a Krabby Patty for him. Krabs wouldn't know that customer ordering a Krabby Patty to go is working for Plankton. Problem is, either his pride won't let him, or he wouldn't think of it. He is focused on getting a patty or the recipe and nothing else.
COBRA in G.I. Joe. The majority of the plots in the cartoon involved stealing/kidnapping someone and ransoming them off for absurd amounts of money, through which they would be able to attain ultimate power. Only about a third of their plots directly incorporated demands of, "Hand over the keys to the entire world, or else!" This was lampshaded by Tamox and Xomat at one point, when they pointed out that Cobra already had absurd amounts of money from its front corporations, black market operations, etc, which is how they got all their ridiculous contraptions to pull off the schemes in the first place.
In the G.I. Joe Extreme season 1 finale, SKAR poisoned the series' equivalent of the United Nations, with only the President spared by the timely intervention of the Joes. Then he holds the world leaders for ransom unless the US is signed over to him. Then when he gets it, he promptly tries to kill the Joes.
Done so with G.I. Joe: Renegades Cobra Industries is already a legitimate pharmaceutical company, and contributed tons of technology to human society. But they still plan on taking over the world.
Pretty much every scheme the title characters of Ed, Edd n' Eddy attempt takes so much work to set up, just to fleece a few quarters from other kids, that they'd have gotten a lot richer if they'd devoted the same effort to mowing peoples' lawns. Often, the ramshackle gadgets Edd designs as part of the scams would be salable in their own right.
They did that exact thing in one of the earliest episodes (possibly the second, after the pool party episode) and it's shown that Ed can mow an entire lawn very quickly with a push mower, but not without reducing most of it to wasteland due to overzealous use. Eventually they turn to using super-powered fertiliser on the area's lawns before cutting Raulph in on the deal by renting his goat. The only reason they come off second best was that they were, if I recall correctly, trapped under the goat's immense bulk at the end of the episode, and were likely up in the region of $50 if they charged $5 a lawn. That's about 5000 jawbreakers...And if the animated size is the be believed, each the size of a basketball...And that's at retail price, and considering that Kevin's father is a major part of the Jawbreaker factory's workforce, seeing as his garage is full of their stock, they should be able to clinch a decent bulk-buy deal. I doubt Kevin will deny the Eds help on that one if his father cuts him in on commission. Hell, Kevin's father could have paid them in Jawbreakers (though he may not have had the job at that point, but still.)
Strangely, the Eds will often ruin their own plans for no apparent reason (it's usually Ed's fault through his usual weirdness or Eddy's fault for being too greedy). In one instance, Ed made a cream puff in a fake bakery they were running, which inexplicably had a bowling pin in it (which is why Jimmy now wears his tooth headgear). You would think Edd would step in and stop them from putting things like that in the food that they intend to sell to be eaten.
Challenge of the Super Friends was notorious for this. Lex Luthor invents a time machine? He and the Legion of Doom use it to steal a few treasures from the past, and never use it again. A teleportation device? They use it to avoid being captured at the end of the episode. But never any other way. Invisibility cloak? Used for a few petty crimes, and never heard from again.
Seanbaby's page mentions one of Brainiac's inane schemes:
...This was so the Legion of Doom could force the world to give them money. I'm no electronically enhanced genius, but if the Legion of Doom is really hurting for money, maybe they shouldn't have built a fucking planet out of toys millions of light years away in the center of a black hole. Put some in the bank.
In Street Sharks, Dr. Paridigm discovers a way to genetically combine species as well as invents a working battle suit and a time machine. He uses the first discovery to create various evil mutants and the other two to kill the non-evil mutants. Justified in that he originally started making mutants for research and wound up insane (and half-piranha) not long after. The Sharks' father (who was the first person to come up with the gene-slamming technique) did want to use it for legitimate research.
In ReBoot, Dot saves the day and ends an episode by helping the The Crimson Binome turn his villainous ways into a legitimate business, because it has higher profit margins.
Several of the villains in Johnny Test fall into this. Brainfreezer is kind of justified though, he wishes he was less evil so he could just use his ice based technology for a legit business. After Johnny helps him with that, he does just that. Bling Bling Boy is another justified example, as he's so rich he doesn't need money...and he got kicked out of school for his thesis eating the teacher's hand. A more interesting example is Mr.Wacko, whose brilliant enough to build giant battle robots but uses them to try and rid the world of children, however, he does so by selling them, thanks to his legal department, legally.
Xiaolin Showdown's Jack Spicer could easily sell his inventions such as his hovering backpack and Jackbots to The Government for tons of money and live an easy life, but he won't because his greatest desire is to Take Over the World and he probably likes the showdowns.
Averted with Pandabubba, who uses Shen Gong Wu for money-making, albiet illegal, ventures.
Averted by a villain on Martha Speaks invented a mind control device and used it in order to open a dog training business. Yeah, still pretty bad and illegal, but at least he tried to make a profit off of it.
One episode of Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers is motivated by this. Mad Scientist Prof. Nimnul has built a lightning generator whose power supply is the static electricity you get from rubbing several hundred fuzzy cats. In his Motive Rant, he claims to have tried selling it to a power company, but the design was so silly that they wouldn't take him seriously. His response is to blast them with the lightning.
Subverted extremely hard in The Venture Bros., where this is the sole purpose of Doc Venture's inventions... which the military yawns at because they either don't work or are the same stuff Jonas Venture Sr. sold them decades earlier. Played straight with Jonas Jr. who makes a luxurious living this way, earning the jealousy of Doc for his success.
Frank William Abagnale, Jr., the real-life inspiration behind Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Catch Me If You Can, went on to found and run a financial fraud consultancy company, preventing wannabe criminals to pull off the same crimes he once did.
Wired magazine recently ran this article on a hacker who, for a time, had a day job helping corporations protect themselves from the likes of him, and spent his trying to penetrate the same kinds of networks. He eventually got busted, big time, for credit card fraud. His partner in crime remarked:
"I couldn't figure it out; what is this guy doing? Why doesn't he just go get a job? Then it dawned on me, many years later: Max just likes to hack."
Kevin Mitnick, hacker, became a successful security consultant.
The best example with the Mafia is their role in Las Vegas. Here they had a legal, profitable business that they had to skim profits on to make it a criminal enterprise.
Justified, in that Nevada gaming regulations make it illegal for a convicted felon to own and operate a casino, so they had to get front men to buy the casinos and then skim off their own profits under the table.
Of course, organized crime often runs a legal, profitable business, because it's an easy way to launder money. If I run a casino, how do the Feds know exactly how much money it made? Put the profits from my protection racket on the books as profit from my casino, and they'll have a hard time tracking it.
Thales of Miletus, an ancient Greek thinker, used his knowledge of meteorology to predict the coming olive growing season would be especially long, and, with his remaining savings, leased in advance all the olive presses in the area right at the time when everyone was going to need them for making olive oil, thus netting him a moderate fortune. This was all in response to the question: "If you know so much, why aren't you rich?" His answer: "I could be if I wanted to be; Philosophers are just interested in other matters."
In the MSNBC documentary The Marrying Kind, con artist George Washington Upton (known to his five simultaneous wives as Dominique Digiorgio) embezzled money from his wives and established companies selling non-existent services. Upon his arrest, one of his former wives said that he was smart enough to have made just as much money through legal means but chose to do fraud instead.
The "Friday Night Bank Robber", Carl Gugasian, could have had a bright future with his mathematical ability, but he was arrested and imprisoned for a crime committed when he was 15. After getting out of jail, he believed that no-one would ever give him legitimate work, so he became a very successful (until he got caught) bank robber.
On the plus side, many criminals have been able to use the notoriety they gain from their dishonest dealings to find legitimate careers. In addition to ex-hackers going on to work for computer companies, and embezzlers who go on to become fraud consultants mentioned above, there were two former burglars who became security consultants teaching people how to keep their houses from being broken into (and later had their own popular Discovery Channel series doing the same), a counterfeiter who used his skills to get a high-level job at a computer company and even a marijuana smuggler who later advertised his services as a business consultant and entrepreneur based on the skills he'd gained building his dope-smuggling ring. Some art forgers who became so notorious for their crimes that people became interested in their own original work, enabling them to make a living as legitimate artists.
There was an even more convoluted case of forgery crime: A guy sold forged Van Goghs to a rich collector, who wanted to buy forged paintings, because this guy's grandfather had been a famous forger, and his copies of the works of famous painters fetched for hefty sums. The catch was that they weren't forgeries made by his gramps, but by himself. Perhaps he has a family tradition up and running in a while....
FBI profiler John Douglas, in his autobiography Manhunter, mentions how, when still a police officer, he helped break up a gambling operation and at one point had a "very talkative bookie" in the back of his squad car. When he observed that the bookie was smart enough to earn money legitimately, the man simply replied that he did it for the thrill, and elaborated on his view. "You see those two raindrops on your windshield? I'll bet you that the one on the left will make it down before the one on the right. You can't stop us, John. It's what we are." Douglas writes that it was this conversation that led him to wonder whether people who continually engage in criminal acts legitimately think differently from law-abiding citizens.
Stéphane Breitwieser traveled all around Europe and stole 239 works of art and other museum exhibits, with a total estimated value of $1.4 billion. He made a whopping profit of $0 because he never tried to sell anything, he just really liked art.
Generally, a surprising number of break-in artists, forgers, embezzlers, and other criminals demonstrate a surprising amount of skill and intellect in committing their crimes, which they could have easily used those talents to make money legitimately. It's one thing to be raised in an environment where crime is almost the only way out, but when you consider how many of these guys are already in a position to make a comfortable living with their skills, this trope is arguably played straight in real life much more than you'd think.
The TV show Masterminds is all about some of the most brilliant criminals ever to operate in the USA. Two of them, the Mission Impossible Burglar and The Florida Housebreaker went into business using their skills after being caught to prevent crime. Then the Mission Impossible Burglar went back to crime afterwards anyway.
When Meyer Lansky was arrested in the early 1970s, an FBI agent was quoted as saying "He could have been the CEO of General Motors if he had wanted."
Look at the extent to which many students go towards cheating. With all that hard work, you wonder if it wouldn't be easier for them to do their work legitimately.
Furthermore, students often rely on extra credit assignments to make up for regular assignments on which they gave little effort into. However, the extra credit often turns out to be more difficult than the regular assignments, thus defeating the purpose of slacking off in the first place.
Sort of. Sometimes a student doesn't have time, or legitimately forgets or just makes mistakes. Thus the beauty of extra credit: students who care about their grade and education will do extra work to make up for their mistakes, learn more in the process, and get positively reinforced for caring about their education AND fixing their mistakes.
One of the craziest inversions may be an inmate who found out how to break out of the federal prison in Hunstville, Texas and decided to make money off it rather than just completely escape: He snuck out every night to buy cigarettes from the nearby Wal-Mart, snuck back in and proceeded to sell the cigarettes to fellow inmates at a profit.
Escape jail, and you will receive more time on top of your sentence if caught and will live forever on the run. If you can make your time on the inside more tolerable and make some bucks while on the side, it may have been simply smart to bide his time, collect his cash, and wait for release as a free man. This makes even more sense when you remember that ex-cons have a hell of a time trying to get a job on the outside; it is perfectly legal to discriminate against felons and escaping jail is a crime in most US States. Since an ex-con must reveal all felony convictions, the prisoner may not have wanted to add "busted outta the joint" to his crimes. If his initial crime was nothing too heinous, it only makes sense.
Many of the people who make Chinese bootleg videogames seem to be surprisingly talented — while there's lots of terrible ones, there's also surprisingly well-made things like Barver Battle Saga (only a bootleg because it was made using assets from other games) and, more shockingly, an NES version of Chrono Trigger that goes all the way up to the fight with Magus.
Subverted by a man who broke into Marriott International's computer network and tried to blackmail the company into giving him a job in their IT department. They didn't.
The guy who leaked Half-Life 2 came into Valve for an interview for a job offered after he contacted them. Then he got arrested.
