LuthorCorp
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LuthorCorp is a fictional company in the WB Network television series Smallville, which tells the story of a young Clark Kent/Superman. It was run by Lionel Luthor, the father of Lex Luthor, since the company's creation until Lionel was arrested for murder at the end of season 3, and since run by Lex.
Having grown up poor in the notorious area of Metropolis known as Suicide Slum, Lionel Luthor was determined to make it big. Hence, he hired his childhood friend, Morgan Edge, to set his family's tenement on fire and kill his parents for the insurance money. Lionel used this money as capital to start up his company, LuthorCorp.
LuthorCorp originally specialized in the manufacture of fertilizer. In 1989 Lionel made a trip to Smallville in order to take a look at the Ross Creamed Corn Plant. Afterwards, when Lionel found out that the Ross Brothers were friends with the Kents, he blackmailed Jonathan Kent to convince the Rosses to sell their plant to him on pain of revealing to the Department of Child and Family Welfare that the Kents' adoption of Clark was a sham (Lionel had engineered Clark's adoption through a firm he owned called Metropolis United Charities). After buying the plant, Lionel transformed it into LuthorCorp Plant #3 (a.k.a. "The Crap Factory"), which provided employment for 2,500 Smallville residents.
Since LuthorCorp's acquisition of the Ross Creamed Corn Plant, it has diversified into many different areas, including:
- agricultural research (the company tried to irradiate seeds with Kryptonite in order to speed up their growth rate)
- medical experiments (LuthorCorp funded studies to bring the dead back to life using a mysterious serum that turned out to be Clark's blood; it also undertook "Project 1138", which was designed to develop a cure to a strange strain of rabies that turned its victim into a vampire)
- bionic research (a subsidiary of the company called SynTechnics focused on creating robots out of deceased humans)
- real estate development (the neighbourhood in which Chloe Sullivan and her father formerly lived in, Pleasant Meadows, was a LuthorCorp development)
History pre2001
Lionel Luthor, the founder of LuthorCorp was born in late 1944 in the poverty stricken Suicide Slum area of Metropolis, Kansas, to Scottish immigrants Lauchlan and Eliza Luthor. In the early 1960s, Lauchlan and Eliza both died in a fire that engulfed their tenement, securing a surprisingly high life insurance inheritance considering their lowly status.
Around the mid1960s Lionel used this money, with a small bank loan, to set up a holding company, Luthor Industries, and bought a run-down fertilizer factory in the Kansas small town of Granville. Applying to business the philosophies of writers such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, as well as some possible illegal tactics as well, Lionel slowly turned the plant round, making his first million around 1970, investing profit into buying land of struggling local farmers, and then evicting them and commencing real estate development projects on their land. In the early 1970s, Luthor Industries was re-christened LuthorCorp and went public, bringing even more money to Lionel's growing pockets.
By the mid1970s Lionel was by far the richest man in Granville, but realized that true greatness would come in Metropolis. Moving back to his place of birth he commenced several real estate projects around Metropolis, most notably Edgecliff Condos in the Suicidal Slums, the Luthor Dome sports arena, the Metropolis Alexandria Hotel and LuthorCorp Plaza at the very centre of the city, were projects that went on throughout the late1970s and early 1980s.This was interrupted in October 1980 with the birth of the Luthors’ son, Lex. Even though his birth was very important to the Luthors, Lionel’s devotion to LuthorCorp means that the history of its history is not affected much.
During this time, Lionel got romantically involved with a younger woman called Lillian, from a fairly wealthy Metropolis family, and fairly soon they became engaged and were married.
In the mid1980s, Lionel decided to return to the agribusiness arena that had made him his first fortune, purchasing a second fertilizer factory in the Edge city area of Metropolis, increasing the amount of fertilizer LuthorCorp was selling, but more importantly, reducing the Kansas competition.
In the late1980s, LuthorCorp was producing enough fertilizer for Lionel to decide that it could be potentially be more profitable to put pressure on competitors by building another factory instead of buying the factories of the competitors, but LuthorCorp would need a factory building to transform into a fertilizer plant, so in 1989 he travelled to Smallville. The following events are easily found elsewhere ( Lex Luthor ), so it simply needs to be said that LuthorCorp purchased the Ross Creamed Corn factory and it became their third fertilizer plant. LuthorCorp also started a major real estate development, De Lex Estates, using farmer’s land obtained the same way as in Granville.
Exact dates between 1989 and 2001 are even less exact, but the following is known:
LuthorCorp (LC) buys/builds a fourth fertilizer plant in Bludhaven, just outside Gotham City in one of Kansas’s neighbouring states (unsure which, either Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska or Oklahoma ).
LC buys/builds about four of each of the following types of factories: Farm equipment; Food preservative; Food packaging. These are built mainly in the third world, making LC a multinational, although a couple are built in the US and Canada.
LC buys global pharmaceutical company Metron.
Research sections are set up in the fertilizer plants to work on improving the fertilizer, including forays into hydroponics and hormones.
LC buys world-champion football team, the Metropolis Sharks.
Lionel Luthor becomes a billionaire in the mid1990s by October 2001 he is a multibillionaire and one of the five richest men in the world.
In October 2001 Lex reaches his twenty-first birthday. LuthorCorp Fertilizer Plant Number 3 is the subsidiary making the greatest loss at this point, so Lionel sends him to attempt to create a profit, promising if he succeeds he will promote him to a LuthorCorp Plaza office as Executive Vice President.
See also
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