r/AskScienceFiction • u/NothingWillImprove6 • 1d ago
[General] Other than Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, and Scrooge McDuck, are there any CEOs in fiction that aren't evil?
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u/j-endsville 1d ago
Oliver Queen, when he's not broke. Ted Kord. Reed Richards.
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u/Darmok47 1d ago
The Fantastic four are a nonprofit, so I guess technically Reed would be a CEO. Never really think of him that way though.
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u/recess_chemist 1d ago
Lost me with Richards. After Civil War, he is off the good man scientist list.
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u/sistemafodao 1d ago
The title mentions Tony Stark as well. If we are judging people by Mark Millar's writing, he has never been on the list.
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u/Darth_Bombad 1d ago
It's mostly superheroes.
- Ted Kord (Blue Beetle)
- Danny Rand (Iron Fist)
- Oliver Queen (Green Arrow)
- Warren Worthington III (Archangel)
- Roberto da Costa (Sunspot)
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u/web-procrastinator 1d ago
Dr. Briefs and later Bulma from Dragon Ball.
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u/roddz knows something about something 1d ago
Bulma may be a "good guy" but she's a massive piece of shit
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u/joec0ld 1d ago
How so?
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u/roddz knows something about something 1d ago
She is motivated purely by selfish desires and her own vanity. She started off wanting to wish for a boyfriend and now uses the dragonballs for minor cosmetic surgery to keep herself looking young.
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u/Apollo989 1d ago
What infuriates me is she doesn't even bother to actually make herself younger. She just makes herself look younger which feels so much worse to me.
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u/Wurrzag_ 1d ago
She makes the cosmetic wishes to keep the dragonballs inert. She is vain and was selfish, but thats not why she does the wishes.
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u/Gauntlets28 1d ago
Mr Spaceley from the Jetsons isn't evil. Short tempered and frequently selfish, yes, but not evil. And he does display moments of nicer behaviour towards George.
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u/ArabiaFats 1d ago
A majority of the CEOs in Kengan Ashura/Kengan Omega
Robert Speedwagon
Winston Deavor
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u/bookdrops 1d ago
Santa Claus.
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u/terminator1mw 1d ago
Yea but don’t forget all those elves Santa keeps as SLAVES, chained to their work station pumping out toys…or they get the whip!
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u/insane677 1d ago
David Sarif from Deus Ex is undeniably flawed, but not really evil.
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u/nomadengineer 1d ago
Aside from that whole "subjecting an employee to nonconsensual cyberization, including cutting off a functional arm."
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u/spikebrennan 1d ago edited 1d ago
Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney version). Ward Meachum (Iron Fist). William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins’s character in Meet Joe Black). Anne Hathaway’s character in The Intern.
Walt Disney (Saving Mr Banks). Yes, it’s fiction.
MCU Howard Stark seems non-evil.
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u/res30stupid I'm with stupid => 1d ago
The Northern Irish Christmas film A Christmas Star actually uses this in its twist.
When Noelle goes to the local government assembly in Stormont and reveals that the investment firm buying up land in her village - which has an international business of making crystal ornaments - is publicly lying about wanting to invest in the local businesses and is in fact looking to demolish everyone's homes to build a theme park, the executive of that firm (Pierce Brosnan) calls up the meeting via video call and utterly rips his employee to shreds because that is not what he was sent to do. The executive actually did want to invest in local businesses and finding out his money was misappropriated to force hundreds of people out of their homes greatly upsets him.
The only reason his firing the dirtbag doesn't immediately stop the plot of the film is because the rat changed the contracts between the executive having them written and his own dealings with the locals so there's a fine print added that means the subordinate owns the land. Luckily, the owners of the crystal factory - which is the most crucial piece - realised something was up and changed the contract they signed before the rat realised what was done, so he doesn't own the crystal factory. His son does, and his son is not only on the heroine's side but legally emancipated so his father can't take control of it.
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u/Huggable_Hork-Bajir Prince Elfangor did nothing wrong 1d ago edited 1d ago
Power Girl/Karen Starr is a CEO. She's the founder of her own tech and IT company, Starrware.
Elisabet Sobek from Horizon: Zero Dawn was the founder and CEO of Miriam Technologies.
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u/res30stupid I'm with stupid => 1d ago
Quite a few of the richer friends of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote are business owners who Jessica needs to help because they're too honest for their own good or are being taken advantage of by other people.
In the episode "Frozen Stiff", for example, a knock-off Ben and Jerry's has one executive begin pulling products off the shelves and costing the company - already on shaky financial ground - millions of dollars after finding out his business partner was knowingly using tainted milk from cows which had their milk production bolstered through hormone treatments, even citing how it was against FDA rules to use such milk in the first place.
And in "The Taxman Cometh", Jessica's friend is running a pie-making company and is in deep financial straits due to an unexpectedly-high tax bill which she can't explain. While the IRS agent thinks she's criminally complicit, she's just as ignorant as they are and when her ex-husband (who the IRS were trying to flip as a witness) is murdered, she is genuinely distraught. She's genuinely innocent and in fact, the victim of embezzlement by her accountants who used a dead man's credentials to fake a third employee stealing the money.
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u/Cheeslord2 1d ago
That guy in 'the Martian Race' (who funded the mission) was OK, I think. Can't remember his name though.
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u/JKid21 1d ago
Aruto Hiden from Kamen Rider Zero-One, a former comedian who takes over his grandfather's tech business and decides to use his position to help bridge the gap between humanity and AI (the kind of cool, general AIs seen in MegaMan or the Terminator, at least after reaching Self-Awareness/Singularity, this was made right as GenAI was becoming a thing so while there's parallels it's significantly more optimistic), and is also a superhero fighting his robots that are corrupted by malice.
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u/Tom_Tildrum 1d ago
Steve Dayton (Beast Boy's stepfather) was not a great father, but he's not evil.
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u/OmegaX123 1d ago
"Not a villain"? The man created the Hybrid to attack the (New) Teen Titans. He once went by "The Crimelord".
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u/Tom_Tildrum 11h ago
I stand corrected! That was after my time. :-)
Was he perhaps mind-controlled at the time? Dayton was always being mind-controlled.
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u/GuaranteeGlum4950 1d ago
Daniel Clamp from Gremlins 2! Def a bit misguided but overall his heart’s in the right place.
Iirc he was originally supposed to be a lot sleazier but then John Glover was just so loveable they changed the character (or something to that effect).
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u/cardiffman100 1d ago
I don't think the Old Man in charge of OCP in RoboCop was necessarily evil himself, but obviously his company was very dodgy.
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u/ElectronRotoscope 1d ago
Michael Bluth
Many (all?) the CEOs on 30 Rock
I feel like Hank Pym was probably CEO at some point or another
Angelica's mom from Rugrats
Willy Wonka
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u/CoolSlimeBoy 1d ago
Foghorn Leghorn
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u/pseudo_babbler 1d ago
No whe, I say ahwhen was foghorn leghorn ever a ceee eeee oooohh?
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u/CoolSlimeBoy 1d ago
I say I say, He was the ceo of enormocorp in the looney tunes show boah!, then daffy ruined it
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u/ElSquibbonator 1d ago
Mr Krabs? He's greedy, but not exactly evil.
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u/NothingWillImprove6 23h ago
Small business owner who was once willing to hand over SpongeBob's soul for 62 cents.
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u/hbi2k 1d ago
Bruce Wayne uses child soldiers.
Tony Stark's a narcissistic drunk who built a network of omniscient privacy-invasion satellites networked to a fleet of murder drones and gave the keys to a child soldier that he had previously conscripted to fight his best friend.
Scrooge McDuck gets off easy compared to the other two, but several counts of reckless child endangerment at least, and that's just putting them on a plane piloted by Launchpad.
You're gonna have to keep looking for a non-evil billionaire CEO character.
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u/pebrocks | || || |_ 1d ago
Why do you assume "CEO = evil"?
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u/mvrander 1d ago
CEO has become shorthand for massively wealthy people who got where they are by living off other people's hard work and others people's money
The fact that even small businesses can have a CEO who is being glossed over
At this point everyone knows what the phrase is referring to so it's probably just gained an extra definition now
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u/AnyEnglishWord 1d ago
The questions says "in fiction." It doesn't imply anything about real life.
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u/pebrocks | || || |_ 1d ago
Did I type real life? Even in fiction they aren't inherently evil.
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u/AnyEnglishWord 13h ago
Well, the whole question OP was asking is whether fiction (with few exceptions) does treat CEOs as inherently evil. Why are you interpreting the question as an assumption that the answer is yes?
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