Amazing Spider-Man #607 by Joe Kelly, Mike McKone & Adriana MeloHere's a question for the readers: How rich do you suppose Dexter Bennett is? This guy claims to have been responsible for about 50% of the new construction in the 1980s. Remember that the construction industry in comic books is a highly profitable organization--more so than on real-Earth. The reason being simply that there are devastating blows to major DC and Marvel cities occurring basically every single day. On Monday, Bullseye might blow up a building, on Tuesday the Green Goblin might pumpkin bomb a bank, on Wednesday Galactus might try to take over again, and so on. It's become quotidian.
The 1980s was a particularly significant decade in overwhelming destruction. There were major events/storylines such as "Secret Wars", "Hulk in Exile," "Mutant Massacre," "Armor Wars," "The Evolutionary War," "Inferno," "Atlantic Attacks," and so forth. And those are just the major events. They don't take into account your run-of-the-mill pumpkin bombing.
So when Dexter Bennett says that he was involved in a huge chunk of construction in the 80s, we know that he must be loaded. About 1/2 the time New York City gets completely leveled by one of the aforementioned events, his company is there doing all the building repairs and restoring everything back to normal so that the villains can knock it all down again. Now of course we don't know how much of this sort of post-apocalyptic reconstruction is typically done by private companies like Bennett's. It might be a public works effort. In fact, there might be some sort of task force standing by with shovels waiting to rebuild after the next attack. Also, we don't know what Bennett exactly means by "new construction" -- it might imply that his business dealt exclusively with new endeavors, not renovation.
If he was involved, though, this could be one of the richest men in the world. Not only would have have made a ton of money from operations, but he claimed that he had only gotten into the business for "tax shelters only." The implication here is that he was already independently wealthy, but didn't own a business. Can you imagine how much money this guy must have? He may have more assets than Tony Stark. He certainly does now since he has extra cash to throw around to purchase newspapers (Dexter Bennett is now the owner of the DB) and Tony's assets have been seized by Norman Osborn.
It's a wonder that Bennett did not become a supervillain himself. After all, we know from one of our earlier posts that millionaires = crazy. Actually, Dexter Bennett is so sane that he backed out of a deal his partner made that he knew to be criminal. And boy what a deal it was. More on this later...
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