this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Well, no. In Iron Man (2008), Iron Man decides that Stark Industries will no longer be selling weapons to the government, and will instead be investing all of its money in clean energy. Then he solves all the wars in the middle east and kills a CEO.
I'm not joshing you, folks, that's literally the plot of the movie. I rewatched it recently, that's exactly what happens.
Hey! Stop that! You're destroying my revolutionary sentiment against fictional superheroes!!
In the second one he gets drunk and fights a bunch of Russian bots
And we know that this is fiction because fiduciary duty means he'd immediately get fired and sued for turning around the company
He immediately got fired and sued. Have you watched the movie?
No he doesn't? He gets sidelined for a while, which he doesn't fight because he's dostracted. Never gets sued. The second movie starts with a hearing where the gov is trying to acquire his new weapons, but it's not a lawsuit and has nothing to do with the company.
So, tell me how he gets sidelined.
Because he's busy building Iron Man armors and locked on his basement/garage and not doing anything CEO related?
At one point I believe the dude tells him that the board has locked him out. So it's not quite as happenstance as you're suggesting.
Are we forgetting Stane was orchestrating the whole thing? Like, the entire movie is him just scheming to take over Stark Industries because he wants to continue selling weapons. I wouldn't put it past him to essentially strongarm or manipulate the other stockholders into locking Stark out, especially given that the entire movie sets him up as someone who can and WILL use violence to get what he wants.
I wouldn't even be surprised if he essentially threatened the other shareholders into locking Tony out, perhaps not directly though.
I don't know how you think I'm forgetting him when I literally brought him up.
Actually, Tony, Pepper, and Obadiah together owned more than half of the company's stock. Obadiah would have needed virtually ALL of the other shareholders to agree to such a lawsuit, and he decided to use violence instead of bothering with the headache that would have been. After he died, anyone trying to do the same would have needed to get Ezekiel Stane on board, while Tony and Pepper were consolidating their control over shares and offering a lot of money for anyone who wanted to cash out of SIA while it was still worth something. So yeah, Tony stopped that from happening by being good at business, it wasn't just plot armour.
Fiduciary Duty is a lie created in the 80s to make corporate raiders more appealing.
Look up Dodge v Ford. This case set the precedent for what is now known as fiduciary duty.
They discuss it in the wiki article:
The 3 Iron Man's, 1 spider-man's, and 1 avenger's villain are still direct results of Toni Stark either being a mad scientist or an oligarch.
Most of that isn't related at all to his superheroics.
Stane and Killian became problems for the world long before Tony became a superhero. Hammer was inspired by Stark's superheroics, but Tony's whole goal for that entire situation was to keep the Iron Man technology out of the hands of people like Hammer. With Toomes, it the federal government stepped in to take over the job and the city didn't properly compensate him. He should have had a better cancellation clause in his contract with the city, Tony isn't responsible for that contract. And Mysterio was exactly what Tony believed him to be. Seems like most of Mysterio's goons were people mad they weren't allowed to design weapons anymore. Quitting evil makes assholes angry, that's not news.
The only supervillain I attribute to Tony's actions as Iron Man is Ultron, and Ultron definitely isn't a manifestation of Capitalism and the current world order. This comic is arguing that superheroes enforce the status quo, but I don't believe Iron Man has acted to enforce the status quo through his superheroics. Your argument that he created those supervillains doesn't convince Me either.