This month, Android founder Andy Rubin will receive his final severance payment from Google. In 2014, Rubin was asked to resign by Google co-founder Larry Page (net worth $52 billion) for sexual misconduct after Rubin allegedly forced another employee into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013.

Rubin’s final instalment this month will be roughly $2 million. Since leaving Google, he’s received the same amount every month for four years. That’s a total of about $90 million, a staggering sum of money that Google kept quiet about until this year. This was one of the many reasons for the recent global protests by Google employees.

Two million dollars a month. It’s bewildering to almost all of us even to comprehend that level of wealth. What would you do with this amount of money? Pay off your bills, car loan, student debts etc.? Maybe you would buy a house? Even after all of that, you’d most likely have tons of money leftover and another $2 million coming your way next month.

Now try to imagine even higher levels of wealth. The kind of money where no matter how much you spend, you could never see an end to the millions you have. What would that do to your life? How would it shape your view of the world and how you see people around you? Would you do good things or would you make the world a worse place to live?

We all hope that money won’t change us, but the possibility remains that the worst sides of ourselves will expand if our day-to-day financial concerns just went away. Simply because modern society has deemed it normal that the more money you have, the fewer consequences you’ll face. Such as a man whose net worth is almost $200 million getting paid a further $90 million for sexual misconduct.

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man (Villain)

In the world of Spider-Man, Harry Osborn has never worried about money. Since his introduction in the comics, his father’s global business dealings through Oscorp has ensured his privilege and his opportunity to become one of Marvel’s most-famous supervillains, the Green Goblin. In the recent highly-successful PlayStation 4 game Spider-Man, developer Insomniac features Osborn as an off-screen character in a lengthy side-quest which fundamentally changes his origins and his view of the world.

Insomniac has transformed one of pop culture’s most famous supervillains into a quiet, unassuming hero.

Instead of just retelling the story of a jealous rich kid who goes off the rails, this version of Harry is a young man who is both grieving and terminally ill but also has plans to help others. Through audio recordings left for his friend Peter Parker, he explains that his late mother’s pet project was to use Oscorp millions to install research stations all over New York City. Their purpose was to monitor, and in some cases prevent, environmental issues that could endanger human life. Everything from the spread of air pollution and infectious diseases to improving the city’s drinking water and old gas pipes.

Before going away for treatment of the same disease that claimed his mother’s life (he tells Peter he’s away in Europe), Harry installs seventeen of these rooftop stations across New York and tasks Peter to test them to prove their value for prolonged funding from Oscorp.

The missions themselves are standard fetch-quests and time-based chases, but after completing them, the implication is clear: despite the possibility of his imminent death, Harry has used his privilege and wealth to benefit the general public with no desire for reward. The game hints at his future as a traditional nemesis for Spider-Man in possible sequels, but for now, Insomniac has transformed one of pop culture’s most famous supervillains into a quiet, unassuming hero.

Would we be as selfless as this incarnation of Harry Osborn if we became multi-millionaires tomorrow? Or would we use that money to actively contribute to harming other people for our own financial gain? How much money does it take to make a monster?

In the grand scheme of things, not that much.

The Making Of A Monster

Amazon employees are reportedly jealous of the Google protests. Last week, it was revealed that executives from Jeff Bezos’ (net worth $130 billion) company partnered with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use Reckognition, Amazon’s facial-scanning surveillance technology. Nobody knows the amount of money changing hands between Amazon and ICE, but after months of brown children being separated from their families by the Trump administration at the US-Mexico border, the effects are common knowledge. Combine that with Reckognition’s history of mistakenly identifying suspects alongside the horror stories of Amazon working conditions and you’ve got a mega-rich company putting its own future ahead of human lives.

How much money does it take to make a monster?

By the way, you read that right. Jeff Bezos, a single human man, is worth over $130 billion. That’s enough to buy over 3,000 islands, pay off the national debt of the United Kingdom or feed every person on the planet. In a country where the latest estimate to end homelessness is roughly a fifth of that amount, Bezos’ personal wealth is utterly incomprehensible to almost everyone on this planet. Well, almost everyone.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is worth $56 billion, Elon Musk of Tesla is worth $22 billion, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is worth $5 billion. All three men have had long histories of controversy and toxic societal influence. Zuckerberg and Dorsey have both had to own up to influencing political votes, encouraging weaponised hate speech and the spread of misinformation upon the minds of their customers. And after misleading investors and calling heroic cave rescuers ‘pedophiles’, who the hell knows what Musk is doing now besides smoking weed with Grimes while they enjoy memes together.

Throughout Spider-Man, Peter Parker begins to suspect that something is wrong with his friend. Harry Osborn’s voice messages start to get stranger and more distant, but his resolve to complete his mother’s work continues unabated. One research station detects the high levels of polycyclic hydrocarbons in the New York environment, and Harry requests the help of his friend to find the source.

In the real world outside of Spider-Man, numerous studies have found that exposure to this chemical compound group (which can come from burning coal and oil spills) increases the risk of lung, skin and bladder cancers in the human body, dating back to the days of 18th-century chimney sweeps. Further research into energy consumption estimates that at the cost of around $5 million each, 4,000 wind turbines could power the entire span of New York City, replacing the need for fossil fuels and drastically reducing the presence of this chemical.

For all these turbines to power one of the most densely populated cities in the world, it would cost around $20 billion, minus the ongoing destruction of the planet, the treatment of terminal diseases and the premature end of countless human lives. Roughly the same cost to end homelessness in the USA or double the amount of taxpayer’s money that the Australian government has spent to lock up refugees for the past five years.

Harry Osborn has had to make concessions in the hopes of having his stations funded for long-term research. One mission in Harlem involves combat drones with cloaking technology. Created for military purposes, Harry tells Peter he doesn’t feel “super awesome” about the ethics of these drones and asks him to shut them down as they start to malfunction. When you’re a company with more money than morals — like Oscorp — you can begin to entertain the idea of private military tech, but Harry subverts his wealth and privilege in an attempt to put a dent into this arm of his father’s business.

Remember Palmer Luckey? The Oculus Rift founder who, after being bought out by Facebook for $3 billion, lied about donating thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton smear campaigns and was subsequently fired? He’s now all about military defence contracting.

Thanks to investment from Peter Thiel (the data mining mogul who shut down Gawker and who is personally worth $2.5 billion), Luckey founded Anduril Industries. Named after the shattered sword in Lord Of The Rings, Anduril’s surveillance technology is already being implemented at the Mexican border by Texas Republicans who voted against the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns. Siding with politicians who will pass uninformed, racist laws to help his company make more money tracking immigrants is just one of the benefits of Luckey receiving a $100 million severance package from Facebook.

Harry Osborn’s privately-funded research stations aren’t a total answer to the world’s problems. After millions of dollars to install, they would not only require ongoing maintenance but also teams of responders to help identify and study the issues that they detect. And these would be teams of ordinary human beings with financial worries of their own, rather than a single friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.

However, throughout this small side-quest in a single video game, these research stations spark the most significant ideas. Preventing disasters, reducing pollution and upgrading outdated infrastructures are typically the responsibilities of city councils and local politicians, most of whom don’t have enough money to battle against huge companies and lobby groups who benefit from these problems rather than work on solving them.

In turn, the concept of super-wealthy individuals (even fictional ones) making a real visible change in the world with their own personal money becomes all the brighter in the murky depths of funding hate groups, tracking terrified immigrant children and forcing your employees into having sex.

Creating Good From Evil

In the history of Spider-Man, Harry Osborn has always been regarded as a good kid who just went bad. Whether it was drugs, jealousy or supernatural forces, his transformation into the Green Goblin is sadly inevitable, but Insomniac gave us an insight into the possibilities of what this rich kid could have achieved before his fall from grace.

As a result, they’ve developed a more human connection to a character who in the past has mostly been represented as painfully two-dimensional. Osborn doesn’t even appear on screen until after the credits but throughout his desire to make New York a better place, creates an emotional core that resonates profoundly in the world we currently see around us. Especially from a person who is meant to be a cackling monster who attacks innocent people with bombs.

The privileged few among us who come into massive amounts of money at an early age run the risk of spiralling out of control and doing more harm than good.

The sales of Spider-Man have been wildly successful, so it makes sense that there will be a sequel. Time will tell if the story revolves around Harry Osborn, but thanks to this tiny string of missions, a character with romantic ideals and the funds to back them up has already been set in place. Which will, no doubt, make his conversion into Spider-Man’s nemesis all the more tragic.

When you’re wealthy and white, opportunities are available to you that most people only dream about. You can help other people’s lives, even save them, and not asking for anything in return. You can change how the world functions for better or worse and be remembered as someone who tried their best to make a difference. You’re not obligated to use your millions to help total strangers, but it’s a general guideline of modern society not to fund ways of harming them either.

Towards the end of the game, it becomes clear that Harry has accepted his fate. Despite treatment, he believes that the disease that ended his mother’s life will also claim his. But he feels satisfied that pouring his millions of dollars into protecting the environment, improving communication networks and detecting catastrophic disasters has been worth the cost.

The privileged few among us who come into massive amounts of money at an early age run the risk of spiralling out of control and doing more harm than good. And before they know it, the money isn’t worth anything compared to the long-term damage they have caused. With each passing voice message, Harry Osborn knows that nobody can take their money with them into the afterlife. They can only leave behind a legacy of being a real-life supervillain.