I notied that the current Luthor in comics and TV seems a have traded in his classic criminal scientist/school janitor’s ensemble for expensive tailored suits. Also, all the scientific stuff seems to some out of his labs or subsidiary organizations these days. Is he even a scientist anymore or just a businessman?
Sigh - Could a mod please move this to Cafe.
He displays scientific acumen from time to time, but mostly leaves it to subordinates.
Faster than a speeding…er…hamster.
The current canon is that he became a business mogul based on his own scientific brilliance.
He parlayed that success into becoming president, but threw it all away when he blamed Superman for an incoming kryptonite meteor. He was impeached in absentia and is currently on the lam, and back to tormenting Superman and friends with super-scientifc plots and devices.
Spoilers for Infinite Crisis coming up:
There are currently two Luthors. One, let’s call him business Lex, is a doppelganger from another variation on Earth (yes, I’m serious). He runs the Villians United, a group with almost every supervillian on Earth and wears business suits. The other is the “real” Lex. He can be seen in darkened rooms wearing a biomech war-suit (yes, I’m serious). Somewhere along the line business Lex booted out mad scientist Lex so most people think that he is the real Luthor. Mad scientist Lex still has some power and was last seen in public attacking the Teen Titans and the Outsiders along with Brainaic.
So to answer your question: yes.
When DC rebooted Superman’s continuity in 1986, Lex went from scientific genius to businessman. One might reasonably interpret this as a reflection of society’s shifting values; back when Luthor was introduced, he was very much the stereotypical ray-gun-wielding mad scientist, who wanted to prove his superiority by testing himself against superman because… well, just because. Wouldn’t you?But by the late 1980’s, the classically mad scientist was no longer a viable archetype, and the multinational corporation had recently cemented its hold in the public mind as the purest form of evil, a title which it continues to hold today.
So Lex became a massively corrupt business tycoon instead, which gave him the best of both worlds, since he could still hire other people to build his ray guns for him. As token acknowledgement of the character’s past, it was established that he originally made his fortune as an inventor in the aerospace industry, but nothing much ever came of that as I recall. Lex wasn’t the only Golden Age villain experiencing science fatigue: his 1/8 size clone Dr. Sivana also eventually became a satanic industrialist. (Disappointingly, the explanation for Luthor’s baldness-- that he was accidentally exposed to depilatory fumes while researching a cure for Kryptonite poisoning-- also fell by the wayside. Today’s Luthor is just bald because he went bald.)
This wasn’t the first time Lex 's character had changed along with the culture: In the fifties he often appeared in the role of underworld boss surrounded by plenty of lackeys and hoods. And in the “I’m OK., You’re OK” mid-'70’s, we were treated to a somewhat gentler Luthor, whose antisocial motivations stemmed from deep (okay, petty) childhood trauma, and who really wasn’t such a bad guy once you got past the whole ‘world-conqueror’ thing. He and Superman often found themselves working together toward some goal.
So how Luthor appears in the comics might be said to roughly correspond to how the culture of the time defines evil. Of course, during the last few years he was the President of the United States in the DC Universe, so obviously this isn’t a perfect generalization.
Actually, they revised his origin again in the Birthright miniseries, which is gradually becoming canon.
Lex has a scientific genius obsessed with finding alien intelligence (since no one on Earth was smart enough to have a meaningful conversation with him). He was balded when a kryptonite-fueled device for peering through time and space (giving him glimpses of Krypton) exploded on him. In Birthright, he’s an astrobiologist, spending his days predicting what aliens would be like on various worlds, and then making technologies based on their predicted physiology. He actually predicted and discovered Krypton and kryptonite based on his observations on Superman’s abilities.
He was still a business man with a legitimate cover, but he’s blown that now. Bruce Wayne owns most of his former assets, and he’s openly a mad scientist/criminal again.